Hi. We’re StarryEyed.
To be starryeyed means to be creative, collaborative, and visionary so you can dream up ideas and make them reality. We combine corporate experience building beloved brands with entrepreneurial expertise to spark ideas that launch and last.
We're operators first: senior-level executives from some of the best brands and insights experts trained as research moderators and analysts who know the consumers who buy them. We've also built, bought, and expanded brands of our own.
Along the way, we realized the teams who need brand strategy most often have the least access to it. So we founded StarryEyed to bring creativity and real-world results that only the world’s biggest companies typically have to businesses of every size.
Yours could be next.
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Liz Seelye
Brand Wayfinding
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Emma Drury
Insights & Innovation
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Jen Gibbons
Consumer Research
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Julie Elepano
PR & Partnerships
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Ian Clark
Culinary & Development
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Jill Holmstrom
Insights & Strategy
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Talia Solomon
Marketing & Stratecution
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Val Zanchettin
Brand Purpose & Innovation
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Erin Fasano
CPG & NPD
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Jenn Reeves
Culture & Trends
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Derek Spors
Food Science/R&D
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Bob Blumer
Gastronomy & Innovation
Why Collaborate with StarryEyed
Insider
Expertise
We’re not career consultants. We’re brand wayfinders who’ve driven success from inside companies as executives, entrepreneurs, and business owners at the most beloved brands
Customized
Dream Teams
We create each team based on the engagement with experts across the functions you need. Our unique model ensures best-in-class deliverables without long timelines or typical agency overhead.
Actionable
Ideas
Unlike design shops that dream up pie-in-the-sky concepts you can’t execute or culinary consultants who only focus on the food, we create consumer-centric ideas that make in-market impact.
Boulder Based,
Globally Engaged
We’re based in the healthiest, happiest, foodiest town of Boulder, CO with projects around the world. We bring teams together, anytime, anywhere for collaboration that moves business forward fast.
We're bringing brand strategy back. And it’s about time.
Too many brands operate in the dark without a plan to ensure they stand apart from the rest and shine.
Most can't answer the most critical question:
What makes us better, different, or worth choosing?
We live to help you answer it, and activate it.
StarryEyed collaborates with brands, big and small, who are ready to win, whether you're a household name or about to become one.
We're operators, executives, and entrepreneurs who've built brands from the inside out across hundreds of engagements for 20+ years.
Frequently Asked Questions
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It's not your logo, your tagline, or your campaign. A brand strategy is the answer to the most critical question every brand asks: what makes us worth choosing? At StarryEyed we call it your North Star — a strategic mantra and company rallying cry that guides every decision, every touchpoint, and every team for the long term. Without it, your target is everyone, campaigns are just noise, innovation is random, and your team is just guessing. Not just a marketing exercise, it is the filter an organization uses to decide what to do, what to build, and where to go next.
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Most engagements start with Insights because you can't create the right strategy without knowing what your consumer actually wants. From there we confirm what makes your brand worth choosing (positioning), find new ways to grow it (innovation), and make sure it shows up creatively and consistently (identity). Scoped to only what you need, not a standard package.
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Most of our engagements run 8–12 weeks. Innovation sprints can move faster Brand inventions to create new-to-world brands with identities and product offerings or full menus take longer. We move faster than most because we are built for brands that need to move quickly, not agencies that bill by the hour.
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Innovation isn't just new products. It's new occasions, new formats, new partnerships, and new reasons for people to choose your brand. The best innovation is grounded in what your consumer actually wants — not what your team thinks is cool or what a competitor just launched.
At StarryEyed, innovation starts with Insights. We find the white space — the unmet needs, the emerging occasions, the cultural shifts — and build ideas that fill it. From there we develop concepts, protocepts, and full innovation pipelines that give your brand ownable, enduring signatures.
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Brand strategy isn't just for brands in trouble or transition. Some of our best work has been with category leaders who want to innovate and stay ahead. If you can't articulate what makes your brand worth choosing, that's a sign. But so is being on top and wanting to make sure you stay there.
Other signs? You don't have a clear picture of who your target really is, your innovation pipeline has run dry, you're ready to expand into new products or categories, you need to organize a growing portfolio with the right architecture, or you want to align your team around a single North Star before someone else defines it for you.
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The best engagements happen when brand teams show up ready to do three things: be creative, stay curious, and commit to the process.
We bring the insights, the frameworks, and the strategic heavy lifting. But the magic happens when your team is in the room, contributing, questioning, and building alongside us. That's how you end up with a strategy your complete company believes in and will use.
The brands we do our best work with aren't looking for the safe answer. They're looking for the true one, even (and especially) when it surprises them. -
We're not the agency that shows up with a big team and long decks to flatter you. We're the firm that shows up with the right people to tell you the truth. And we don't disappear to figure it all out and report back. We create and activate ideas in collaboration with you, so your team has the authorship and ownership to make all that we create together reality.
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Our core expertise is in the restaurant, hospitality, and CPG industries, but the same branding principals apply across industries. We collaborate with brands outside those categories, including beauty, clean energy, outdoor lifestyle, and more. If you're not sure whether we're the right fit, the best first step is a conversation.
We believe brands are more than what you buy or sell.
They should be a force for good to improve our lives.
That’s why we take a different approach to building brands. We move past the same facts and figures to understand what your target audience cares about most.
By blending real-world insights with a future-focused view of the world, we help you build enduring brands that’ll make your consumers (dare we say?)… starryeyed.
