Irizarry Beauty
Shannon Irizarry is a Puerto Rican makeup artist in the San Francisco Bay Area, specializing in bridal. She'd built a clientele on word of mouth and skill. When we started working together, she had a real business and almost no brand to support it.
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
I started by repositioning 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 didn't exist. 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 the offer. She just hadn't named it.
I positioned Irizarry Beauty as the bridal makeup artist for modern, multicultural brides. The identity followed: interlocking shapes in a palette of skin tones, layered so the colors blend. A visual language for what Shannon actually does — move fluently across skin tones most artists treat as separate problems. Deep red and warm neutrals. Confident and grown-up, not soft-pink bridal.
The result
A brand that finally matched the skill behind it.
Shannon cried when she saw it. It was the first time she'd seen the business she'd built reflected back to her. She's since expanded her own vision for the brand, building on the content direction we mapped together.
