Worldbuilding✦︎

Refinery29 was in its fastest growth period with no agreed articulation of what the brand was, and an agency and an independent contractor had both already failed to define it. Piera Gelardi, Co-Founder and Executive Creative Director, asked me to facilitate a brand model discovery workshop; we gathered twelve executives with diverse, loud opinions and left the room with a simple mission statement everyone agreed on.

From there, we created the Brand Leadership Team, which I helmed, and built out the brand world the model implied. We adapted the generic brand model diagram into a storytelling mechanism: the R29 Rocketship, an avatar for the brand, and from it an entire, literal universe.

The world contained a microsite where the brand could be entered rather than read about, a manifesto film I scripted and voiced, and assets that ran from investor collateral down to laptop stickers. With the Head of People, I applied this universe into an employee engagement program to guide brand champions into the world we had built.

I originated the model.

“She came into our company in a new position with a big task — to wrangle founders and executives in the company to nail down our brand vision, mission, and brand framework. An agency and an independent contractor had both failed to get us there. Saga took on the challenge with wisdom, good humor, and discipline quickly synthesizing the work we’d done and creating efficient workshops that drove us to a decision in 2 sessions.

I couldn’t believe it.”

Piera Gelardi · Co-Founder & ECD, Refinery29

OFFICIAL was the first performance-driven real estate company, serving the highest end of the market. What began as a copywriting brief to support new agents entering it became, over eleven months, a scope that covered visioning and finding language for newly developed arms across the vertical and horizontal scales of the business.

I launched every agent with an activation package that strategically positioned and named their personal brand, and wrote foundational copy in the voice, with rules on how to write that voice for the agent marketing team. When the company opened a new office in Aspen, I wrote the manifesto for the new market; it was installed as a gallery wall in the office. I helped articulate the company's vision for building the future through the conceptual development and narrative framing of ODA, the new development arm. I wrote the company's ethos and the bar it set for its people into the framework for its talent recruitment program, PRODIGY. When faced with the necessity of a rebrand, I was invited onto the internal stakeholder team to lead the tonality; CIELE was our answer. Video: Clare Cheyne
Visuals: Leslie Bakke
Language: Saga Blane

I was accountable for four new arms of the business, and then for the company itself.

Meta's Global Clients & Categories team is the intimate group responsible for the company's highest-paying clients. I joined it as a paternity cover, mid-pandemic, tasked with the research and writing of cultural intelligence topics for those clients, connecting what was going on in the world to client problems and Meta's solutions.

My anchor piece was a narrative on the future of beauty: an industry that went from $538 billion to $458 billion in a year during COVID, when foundational behaviors such as trying on a product in store were no longer available. The work covered global regions with a focus on APAC and required collaboration with stakeholders across markets.

I listened to where culture was going during the pandemic for Meta’s largest clients.

“I first met Saga as an interview candidate for the WPP Fellowship Program. This is a rigorous selection process, where 7 candidates are offered a place, from over 1600 applicants from the world over. As a Global Strategy Director at J Walter Thompson (part of WPP), I was on the interview panel, as well as a Mentor for some of those selected. We knew immediately that Saga was an exceptional candidate, but I understood why only when I worked with her and got to see her talent up close.

At Meta (then Facebook), Saga had to design and write a presentation that demonstrated to our top 20 global clients why Asia was different, and in fact, racing ahead of the rest of the world. Saga did all the research herself, sitting at the opposite end of the world, coordinated and sought input proactively from colleagues in Asia, and brilliantly conceived a ‘four truths’ presentation that was compellingly written, and visually arresting.”

Shekhar Deshpande · Head of Strategy, Global Clients · Meta

In 2016, Mindshare was one of the largest media agencies in the world. Mindshare Entertainment was its content studio, and Hairscale was the experiment: could the agency's social listening be translated into finished creative fast enough to still be relevant?

Within a rapid turnaround of one week, the responsive content program made assets based off the hair trends of the moment: insight on Monday, creative brief on Tuesday, shoot on Wednesday, post-production on Thursday, shipped on Friday.

My role crossed the entire pipeline, from finding the insight to writing the brief to producing the shoot to directing the talent to even being the talent!* This program paved the way for moving intelligence into creative at the speed of culture.* Real footage of me dyeing my hair pink, when we couldn't find a model who would do it.

I found the form for responsive creative that moved from listening to shipping at speed.

AdaMarie is a technology company closing the gender gap in STEM careers. Before the product launched, I was brought in to build a content ecosystem that could draw in the audience, establish the voice of the brand, and warm the room for when the product — a ‘LinkedIn for Women in STEM’ — was ready for market.

The company had just broadened its target to women aged 18 to 34. I built four personas inside that segment, set on archetypal mindsets: the graduate hitting a reality check after a bubble of exceptionalism popped, the 59 percent who never went to college, the mid-career woman who looks excellent on paper and is burning out, and the transitioner who did not know she was STEM. From there, four content pillars: neurodiversity, quiet quitting, resumes and interviewing, happiness and purpose. The work was written against an acquisition target of 9,000 profiles before launch, at 1,500 a month.

Three weeks after the end of my scope, the company reported the waitlist and content site past 1,000 subscribers, and Instagram followers up 44 percent in two weeks. AdaMarie is still running today.

I built the editorial voice to call in an audience before the product.

Prince Hassan runs a luxury real estate practice in Fort Lauderdale and Miami. At a pivotal growth moment, expanding into the NYC market and defining his brand along the lines of his lineage, he called me in to direct his brand evolution.

Following a discovery process into the essence of the brand, which I then named and crafted into a verbal identity, I led the build of the brand identity system, curating the team, facilitating the creative process, and holding the terms of engagement. In close partnership with Prince, I helped him initiate a retreat sub-brand, connected him with a network of consultants in my Pythia Collaborative network, and built him an operational infrastructure with AI.

The result was the first-ever Brand Voice Studio for a luxury real estate agent, applying his verbal identity into generative models to replicate his voice across channels and to hold the memory of the work.

I built the system that could carry his voice forward.

The Raleigh opened on Collins Avenue in the 1940s and became the hotel Miami Beach went to be seen at; Karl Lagerfeld staged a Chanel Cruise show at its pool in 2009. When SHVO decided to reimagine it, he enlisted Peter Marino, the architect behind the flagship stores of Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton, to design the campus.

In collaboration with Lipman Studios, I led the Voice Direction. I named the three-part property the triptych.

The creative platform for the Voice was the art world, drawing from the insight that Michael Shvo and Peter Marino share a passion for art. This territory cast them as an artist duo in the line of Les Lalanne, their muse, making their Magnum Opus. The audience was the billionaire who collects the finest things on earth, and who would be the buyer for a three-bedroom home starting at $10 million or a penthouse priced above $150 million.

I crafted the voice for an iconic hotel positioned for a rebrand to the highest end of the market.

The WPP Fellowship is a three-year program inside one of the world's largest communications holding companies: fellows spend one year each in three different WPP companies, often on three different continents. The advertising executives who launched it named it “harder to get into than Harvard.” Fellows are scattered across the world by design. In its twentieth year, they were brought together for the first time.

Jon Steel, director of the program for over fifteen years, asked me to coordinate the book to commemorate this milestone. I connected with all fellows, past and present; I compiled their contributions and realized there were distinct patterns within the material. Instead of organizing it by chronology, I structured the storytelling along a thematic one. The book was printed and presented at a dinner at the Tower of London.

I found the threads that connected 170 fellows across twenty years of this prestigious fellowship program.

“Sometimes you get to see the true potential of a person in the smaller projects, rather than the big ones. Saga jumped in and offered to lead this project, in addition to her full time job at the company. She conceptualized the ‘year book’ for Fellows, designed it, wrote the content, and was patient and held steadfast through several budget, logistical and other challenges. This was a project that would have little professional consequence for her, but she remained committed, and saw it through. It was one of the most wonderful yearbooks I have ever seen.”

Shekhar Deshpande · Head of Strategy, Global Clients · Meta

Industry-standard brand craft is gatekept: priced for large companies and taught in a language small founders are never handed. Upon leaving WPP and venturing out to start my own business, I built Brand Bootcamp: a self-led course of ten 15-minute modules and an accompanying workbook, to make it usable at any size. I applied this methodology repeatedly as a coach, helping entrepreneurs define their brand and scale their business across categories.

The people I have worked with include: an Instagram-influencer shamanic healer, an herbalist and rewilding expert, a psycho-spiritual therapist whose modality I named (the Unconscious Mapping System), a natural-dye couturier, a detox living platform, a Haitian café in New Jersey, two women from a yoga studio opening a shop of small-batch goods for women’s sexual and energetic health. The work bridged everything from a founder’s sense of purpose to scheduling content in the backend of Meta’s studio. The names I gave and the frameworks I set are still in use a decade later.* This video is module eight: Stand Out from the Pack. In it I present my “magic formula”: stand in category principles, then look outside the category for the creative wrapper that expresses the central idea. I was nine months pregnant when I shot the course at The Wing in downtown New York.

I created the methodology that took communications knowledge out of the ivory tower.

“Working with Saga is like working with a spiritual healer for your business. She really listens to who you are and helps you to grow your dreams immensely.”

Deborah Hanekamp · Mama Medicine · writer, seer and mystic, author of Ritual Baths

“Work shopping with Saga was such a profound gift, providing me clarity and direction on my path. As we journeyed through the boot camps, Saga distilled the deeper layers and nuances of my offerings into concise, straightforward, and digestible material. When people ask, ‘What is your offering?’, I reply with clarity and confidence.”

Julia Bond, LAc · Acupuncturist, with the earth · Bozeman, Montana

“Saga’s branding bootcamp offered me rare, insightful, and wise guidance. I was delighted to begin a journey with Saga that led me to discover the soul of my brand, and I ended her exercises with a roadmap and filters to make business decisions that nurture my brand.”

Sophia Ruan Gushée · Founder, Ruan Living · detox and nontoxic living platform

“Everyday, as I work on building the bakery brand, I think about if only I was still working with her on this. She is exceptional in her ability to understand a vision and help founders, visionary innovators like me, concretely execute and articulate their vision to founders, investors and customers. Her skill in this area is remarkable.”

Judithe Registre · Co-founder, Café du Pain Bakery · social impact entrepreneur

“Saga Blane did what no one has been able to do before. In literally 2 months she was able to translate my rather mysterious and powerful healing practice offering into a website that is clear, inviting, and totally 100% me! More than anything Saga is a master storyteller! She really listens and then with her brilliant mind and her capacity to understand the market she delivers a product that both expresses the heart of the story and meets the consumer exactly where they are!”

Jozi Radus · Integrative psycho-spiritual therapist · creator of the Unconscious Mapping System

“Not only did she do an incredibly thoughtful job of diving into and reflecting back the strengths and unique qualities on which to continue to cultivate my brand, but even more, in just one hour she instilled in me the most valuable sense of confidence I could have asked for as a practitioner. Saga did a meaningful job of identifying and reminding me of what makes me and my approach different.”

Kim Bielak, AMFT · Marriage & family therapist

This pitch for an organization was an opportunity to develop the template for my collaborative agency model at full scale. A century-old international membership organization, losing relevance with a younger generation, came with an RFP for a new logo, colors and fonts, messaging and a website. An optics-level change.

A refresh signals change without making it. Reading the brief, I could see them spending the money and standing in the same place two years later. So I scoped exactly what they asked for, at their stated budget, and then set beside it the work the situation actually needed: listening and research, a systemically driven brand ecosystem that reached into behavior (not only identity), thought leadership on participation and momentum, and the infrastructure to carry it.

A systemic change.

With the collaborative model of multiple consultants working concurrently, the brand and website timeline was projected at sixteen weeks, against the eight to ten months that scope normally takes to procure and build. What they asked for came to roughly two-thirds of what I proposed, and the proposal was dismissed on price before the interview round.

The pitch crystallized a concrete proposition: a curated network of independent consultants, assembled around a specific client, operating at a speed and agility where conventional agencies lag. Decentralized and participatory but momentum-driven, contracting through one place. No middleman and no office space to pay for, which is why direct access to this level of craft is not expensive.

We call it the anti-agency.

I curate and facilitate the teams that align with a client’s custom challenges.