Creating Powerful, Beautiful & Magnetic Brands

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in digital marketing but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Tim Girvin, Founder & CEO of GIRVIN | Strategic Branding & Design, located in Seattle, WA, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Our focus radiates the spokes of strategic integrations. We synchronize cohesively unforgettable brand assets with team-based BrandQuest® leadership workshops, logos, naming, messaging, imagery, packaging, built environments and interiors, bespoke brand fonts, websites, digital media, and social. We work with brand teams all over North America and internationally on brand design programs to support improved recognition, audience expansion, and brand memorability. Our clients are brand leaders and enterprise drivers that are looking for improved performance--bettering shelf power, boosting brand place experiences--restaurants and stores, accessible and brand-relevant content, enlarging audiences and committed communities, and enabling brand storytelling for and with guests and customers.

Tell us about yourself

I started out as a scientist--and it was in my lab journals that I found the power of integrating scientific illustrations with text, as in the essential principles of book design, packaging ideas, imagery, and messages. That led to working on stores and restaurants--and doing everything for them, from shopfronts to signage, interiors, furniture, merchandising, and print collateral. That took me towards looking at larger and more complex programs and working on-site, in-store, and in-restaurant in Seattle, San Franciso, LA, Chicago, NY, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, and Jakarta. I was looking for and building in a brand patterning language--a voice that speaks to the heart of the guest and to the soul of the brand. Daily motivation? Fascination--learning and the journey forward: today and the future.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

We started brand development and integrated design in 1976. And since then, we've become one of the longest-running, privately-held brand consultancies in North America--approaching 50 years in continuous operations.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

Creativity is emotionally rich; it's complicated. Creativity isn't intellectual at its core--it's spiritual, it's soulful, it's personal. As a brand strategist, one can always presume a certain degree of certainty with research, anthropological insights, customer testing, and informational interception--but in the end, invariably, it's the deep instincts of gut reaction and intuition that prove themselves at the end. What you feel is probably right. The core principles of any brand would be--"what's the story, who's telling it, and to whom?" And finally, most crucially--" who cares?"

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

Focus on what you love--what you love doing--and what's the most endlessly fascinating line of exploration. What's a question that you find yourself continuously examining?

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.girvin.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tim.girvin
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timgirvinart/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timgirvin/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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