For two years, I led the Billion-dollar beauty brand Sol de Janeiro's in-house (and only) agency.

I contributed to elevating brand awareness from 9% to 40%, expanding our brand presence from 11 countries to 48. I had the privilege of collaborating directly with the esteemed CEO and Founder, Heela Yang. It wouldn't have been possible without the hard work and wisdom of many, many people.

Here are five significant milestones we achieved while growing the creative headcount from 17 to 70:

Including the first true 360 brand campaign SDJ had that took over the world. It was a lot of fun designing this font and creating the brand film from scratch | Hooray to Ashley Dione and her Army of Designers.

1 - designed a few launch campaigns,

2 - sat next to the Product Development team to feed them with all sorts of nosy opinions.

From Color picking to new product names. I was also very into new category products (I can't show the last ones, sorry!)

3 - empowered our studios to become powerhouses: one in NY and one in Rio.

Shout out to Monique Carter in New York (the 5ft tall with a giant presence in a studio) and to Wallace Fortes & Carol Rabello from the Rio Hub—a duo that went from creating scrappy fast content to creating magnificent fast content.

4 - Fuel the visual merchandising team with new blood, new ideas, and new processes

Katy Yang and the true VM heroes are the ones who actually worked - I just sat there and saw the magic happen. Cheers to them!

All of that, knowing that people make the work before the work makes the people.

Long live Sol de Janeiro. And yes, I do miss all these folks.