My Walls Are Hung Salon Style and My Brand Strategy Works the Same Way

There is a wall in my home that I love unreasonably.

It is hung salon style. Which means there is no single focal point, no careful grid, small amount of breathing room between frames. There are paintings I made, paintings friends gifted, things I found at thrift stores, a print I bought at a museum, a piece of framed ephemera that means something only to me. They are grouped by instinct and resonance rather than by size or medium or any principle I could explain easily.

People who come to my home either immediately understand something about me from that wall or they stand in front of it looking slightly overwhelmed.

Both responses tell me something useful.

The people who feel immediately at home in front of it are often the same people who feel immediately at home in my work. They like density. They like layers. They like the sense that there is more to find if you keep looking. They are not looking for minimalism. They are looking for richness.

The people who find it overwhelming are not wrong to feel that way. It is a lot. I am a lot. My work is a lot, in the sense that it asks people to look at themselves with genuine honesty rather than comfortable distance. It is not for everyone and it is not trying to be.

That wall is, without my having planned it that way, a piece of brand strategy, illustrated.

What Maximalism Has to Do With Messaging

Most brand advice defaults to minimalism.

Clean. Simple. Clear. One message. One audience. One offer at a time. Strip it back until there is nothing left to confuse anyone.

This advice is not wrong…not exactly. Clarity matters. And, this is advice that was designed for a certain kind of mind and a certain kind of work. It does not serve everyone equally.

For entrepreneurs who are polymaths, multidisciplinary thinkers, people who have always been interested in (too) many things at once, the strip-it-back approach often strips out the very thing that makes their work distinctive. So they lose a sense of richness.

The richness is not the problem. The lack of a coherent organizing principle is the problem.

A salon wall works not because it abandons order but because it has a different kind of order. The groupings are intentional even when they are not symmetrical. The pieces are in conversation with each other even when they are not identical. There is a logic to it even when that logic is felt rather than explained.

Brand strategy for complex, multidisciplinary thinkers works the same way.

The goal is not to flatten everything into a single clean message. The goal is to find the organizing principle underneath the complexity. The through-line that holds everything together even when the surface looks like a lot.

Finding the Through-Line

When I work with clients who describe themselves as scattered or hard to categorize or impossible to put in a box, I reassure them….I am NEVER trying to put them in a box.

I am looking for the salon wall.

I am looking for the groupings that already exist underneath the apparent chaos. The themes that keep appearing across different offers, different stories, different versions of how they describe their work to different people.

Those themes are always there. The work is to name them.

In my own case, the themes are consistent across everything I do regardless of how I am describing it on any given day.

Pattern recognition. Translation between different ways of knowing. The belief that personal history is professional foundation. The conviction that complexity and clarity are not opposites. The insistence that sustainable work has to be rooted in something true about the person doing it.

Those themes show up in my salon wall. They show up in my bookshelves, which are organized by spine color in rainbow order as a sorting experience in resonance and visual logic rather than category. They show up in the eighty camels I have collected over the years, each one chosen because it held some meaning, some memory, some connection to someone I love.

The themes show up in my work because they are not separate from my work. They are the same organizing principle expressed in different materials.

Why This Matters for Your Brand

If you have been trying to build a brand by suppressing the complexity of who you are, you are probably exhausted.

Not because complexity is bad strategy. Because performing simplicity you do not feel is unsustainable.

The alternative is not to embrace chaos. It is to find your organizing principle.

What is the logic underneath everything you do? What do all your best offers have in common, even when they look different on the surface? What do all your best client relationships share? What do people consistently say about what it is like to work with you?

The answers to those questions are your brand pillars. Not invented. Discovered.

They were already there the way the groupings on a salon wall are already there before you name them. Your job is not to create them. Your job is to see them clearly enough to articulate them. Then repeat.

Once you have them, everything else becomes easier.

Content decisions. Offer decisions. Collaboration decisions. The question stops being “what should I say?” and starts being “what is true and does this reflect it?”.

That is a fundamentally different relationship with your work. And it is available to everyone, including the people who have always been told they are too much or too complicated or too hard to market.

You are not too much. Perhaps you have not found your salon wall yet.

How to Start

Look at your physical space the way you would look at someone else's and try to read it with an honest observer’s eye.

What keeps appearing? What are you drawn to collect? What is within arm's reach when you are working? What is on your walls, your shelves, your bedside table?

These are not decorating questions. They are brand personality questions.

The objects, images, books and tools we choose to keep close are a record of what matters to us. They are the physical equivalent of the salon wall. And they are telling you something about your work if you are willing to listen.

In Brand Strategy Unlocked, we use a tool called the Authenticity Guide that walks through exactly this kind of observation. It is not about aesthetics for their own sake. It is about using what you are already drawn to as a way into understanding what you actually value and how those values show up in your work.

The salon wall is one starting point. Yours might be something entirely different.

But there is a starting point. And it is already in your home, waiting to be read.

FAQ

What are brand pillars and why do they matter?

Brand pillars are the core themes that hold your work together across all your offers, content, and client relationships. They are not marketing language. They are the values and approaches that are consistently true about how you work and why. When you know your brand pillars, every content and business decision becomes clearer because you have a filter to run things through.

How do I find my brand pillars if I feel like I do too many things?

The feeling of doing too many things often means you have not yet named the organizing principle underneath them. Brand pillar work is about identifying what all your best work has in common, not about narrowing what you do. The through-line is usually already there. It just needs to be named.

Is brand strategy different for neurodivergent entrepreneurs?

The destination is the same but the path often needs to be different. Much standard brand advice assumes a linear, narrowing process that does not work well for people whose minds make connections across categories rather than drilling down into one. An inside-out approach that starts with personal history, aesthetic values, and genuine passions tends to work better and produce more sustainable results.

Can a maximalist aesthetic be professional?

Yes. Professionalism is about reliability, expertise, and clear communication, not about visual minimalism. Many highly successful brands have rich, layered, complex aesthetics. What matters is that the aesthetic reflects something true about the person or organization behind it and that it communicates clearly to the right audience.

How long does it take to develop a clear brand strategy?

This varies significantly depending on how much self-knowledge you are starting with, how much prior work you have done on your messaging, and how complex your offer suite is. In Brand Strategy Unlocked, a four-week small group program, most participants leave with a working brand foundation including pillars, voice guidance, and story material. Deeper implementation takes longer and is often supported through ongoing coaching or membership.

Does Katie Helms work with entrepreneurs who have multiple offers or are in transition?

Yes, and this is a specialty. Many clients come to me specifically because they are in the middle of pivoting, adding offers, or trying to bring coherence to work that has grown in multiple directions at once. The inside-out approach is particularly useful in transition because it anchors you in what is consistently true about you rather than what you are currently offering.

Does Katie Helms work with clients outside the United States?

Yes. All programs and consulting are delivered online and serve entrepreneurs across the globe. Time zones may be a complication but is not a barrier to working together.