Shannon Irizarry is a Puerto Rican makeup artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, specializing in bridal. She'd spent years building a clientele on word of mouth and skill.

She came to me not entirely sure what she needed. Just that something wasn't connecting.

The problem

Shannon was an exceptional bridal makeup artist with deep technical training and a differentiated personal background. From the outside, she looked like every other bridal makeup artist in the Bay Area.

The real issue ran deeper. Shannon had a strategic asset she hadn't named yet, and the brand couldn't surface what wasn't being claimed.

What I did

The first thing I did was reposition the business.

Most of my career was spent in multicultural advertising, and I've watched the same pattern over and over: Hispanic women grow up underestimating their own expertise. Many of us learned to mix our own foundations as teenagers because the shade ranges available to us simply didn't exist. We grew up before Fenty, before brands took skin tone seriously. Shannon had lived that, then trained as a makeup artist, and become extremely good at color-matching across the full range of skin tones because she'd been doing it on herself her entire life. Her background was the strategic core of what she offered. She just hadn't named it yet.

I positioned Irizarry Beauty as the bridal makeup artist for modern, multicultural brides. The visual identity followed: a logo built from interlocking shapes in a palette of skin tones, layered so the colors blend. A visual language for what Shannon actually does, which is move fluently across skin tones that most artists treat as separate problems. The packaging palette (deep red, warm neutrals) reads confident and grown-up, not bridal in the soft-pink sense.

The result

A brand that finally matched the level of skill behind it, and a clearer sense of who Shannon was for.

Shannon cried when she saw the final brand, because it was the first time she'd seen the business she'd built reflected back to her. Since then, she's expanded her own vision for the brand, building on the content direction we mapped together.