Coterie Noir
Brand Voice Guidelines Work
At Daily Harvest, I was part of the team that built the brand's copy guidelines from scratch — manifesto, audience personas, voice and tone principles, messaging framework, and channel-specific examples. I contributed to the document, presented it to partners, and wrote to it daily across email, social, web, in-app, direct mail, and retail.
The problem we were solving: the existing brand voice reference point — "Reformation on happy pills" — was founder-created and by that time, outdated. Additionally, it wasn't grounded enough for the broader team to actually write to. We needed a set of guidelines that anyone at the company, across any function, could pick up and run.
My team moved the brand from "Reformation on happy pills" to "your cooler, older sister who gives great advice."
When I went independent, I translated that same methodology to client work. The Daily Harvest guidelines were a team effort — I wanted to show you something I built end-to-end. Below is a brand voice deck I built in 2023 for Coterie Noir, a training program for Black women building product-based businesses.
The client had a clear point of view but no codified language for it — copy varied depending on who was writing. I built the system that made the brand voice and copy distinct. The deck includes: brand foundations (purpose, mission, vision, values), a manifesto, an audience persona with enough specificity to actually guide copy decisions, a voice and personality framework with examples, a messaging framework with tagline and content pillars, and a "words we love / words we loathe" section. It served as a first read before writing anything, and a gut-check before publishing.
