Craftex: Building a Culture Brand Foundation for a Houston Décor Institution

Client: Craftex Wholesale Distributors | craftex.com

The Challenge: Craftex Wholesale Distributors is a Houston-based interior décor company that's been operating since 1977. Over nearly five decades, they'd built a loyal following, a reputation for extraordinary seasonal merchandise, and a showroom experience that customers describe as genuinely unlike anything else in the market. But the brand's internal culture and external-facing identity had grown in different directions. Employees lacked a shared sense of purpose. Communication across departments was inconsistent. Digital touchpoints lagged far behind the in-store experience. And with a new leadership era underway, the company needed a clear-eyed evaluation of where they stood — and a strategic foundation they could actually build on. That's where Blackribbit came in.

My Role and Approach: As Lead Market Researcher, I was the primary driver of the research and situation analysis phase, contributing across several key streams:

Online Brand Diagnostic: I led a systematic audit of Craftex's full digital footprint — analyzing search visibility, social media presence across five platforms, website UI/UX, and customer reviews — to surface how the brand was actually being perceived versus how it intended to be seen.
Competitive Landscape Analysis: I researched five competitors in the decorative wholesale and home décor space, evaluating their market positioning, digital strategies, and brand communication to identify where Craftex held real advantages and where it was losing ground.
Stakeholder Interviews: I participated in interviews conducted across leadership, employees, B2B customers, B2C customers, and vendors — gathering perspectives on culture, communication, and customer experience that became central to the strategy phase.
Brand Strategy Development: Working closely with the strategy team, I contributed to developing Craftex's positioning, target audience profiles, value proposition, emotional brand pillars, and the foundational culture brand statement — translating the research findings into the strategic framework that would anchor the brand playbook, employee handbook, and activation plan.
Survey Development: I helped develop and administer both an internal employee satisfaction survey and a customer experience survey — the employee survey exploring workplace satisfaction, values clarity, and interdepartmental collaboration, and the customer survey establishing baseline metrics across brand perception, product differentiation, and touchpoint consistency.

Key Contributions:

Delivered the online brand diagnostic and competitive landscape analysis that formed the research backbone of the engagement.
Helped surface the central tension in Craftex's brand — a genuinely exceptional in-store and product experience that wasn't translating to digital presence, internal culture, or customer-facing messaging — clearly enough to anchor the team's strategic direction.
Contributed to stakeholder interview synthesis, consolidating perspectives across five distinct stakeholder groups into findings that directly shaped the brand strategy phase.
Helped develop the brand strategy framework, including Craftex's positioning as a premier hybrid destination for both design professionals and discerning homeowners — a reframe that resolved the wholesale/retail identity tension and became the foundation for all subsequent deliverables.

The Outcome: The engagement moved Craftex through a full brand evaluation, strategy, and activation planning process. The research phase produced the foundation for everything Blackribbit built afterward — the culture playbook, the employee handbook, and a 12-month activation plan targeting internal culture adoption, a content creation engine, and expanded digital reach. The plan was designed to be self-sustaining, with Craftex owning the systems and workflows long after Blackribbit transitions out.

Why This Project Showcases My Skills: Craftex is a decades-old business with real texture: loyal customers, a bilingual workforce, deeply seasonal operations, and a meaningful gap between how it presents externally and how it functions internally. Getting useful research out of that kind of environment requires knowing what questions to ask, how to synthesize conflicting signals across stakeholder groups, and how to organize findings in a way that actually serves the strategy team. Contributing across both the research and strategy phases of the same engagement also reflects the kind of end-to-end involvement that's rare in a researcher role.

Image: Blackribbit

Image: ecicollaborative.net

Empowering Communities Initiative: Brand Evaluation & Strategic Activation

Client: Empowering Communities Initiative (ECI) | ecicollaborative.net

The Challenge: The Empowering Communities Initiative is a Houston-based coalition of 11 member organizations serving immigrant and refugee communities across Greater Houston in over 15 languages — from Vietnamese and Korean to Arabic, Burmese, and Dari. Founded around 2017–2018, ECI had evolved from an informal coordination network into a formal 501(c)(3), and was preparing to launch a unified brand identity and digital platform. The challenge: while each member organization was a trusted household name within its own community, ECI itself had little visibility as a collective entity — and no brand presence to match the scale of its actual impact.

My Role and Approach: As Lead Market Researcher, I was the primary driver of the research and situation analysis, while also contributing across the strategy and activation phases of the engagement:

Coalition Member Organization Online Analysis: I conducted a detailed brand and digital presence audit of all 11 ECI member organizations — analyzing public reviews across Google, Yelp, Glassdoor, Indeed, and social media — to assess each organization's digital readiness, community trust, and capacity for unified platform participation.
Adjacent Landscape Analysis: I researched national organizations serving immigrant and marginalized communities, evaluating their coalition models, digital engagement strategies, and brand positioning to identify where ECI could carve out a distinctive market position.
Stakeholder Interviews: I participated in interviews conducted across all 11 coalition member organizations, gathering perspectives on coordination effectiveness, referral infrastructure, and collective impact that directly informed the strategy phase.
Brand Strategy Development: Working closely with the strategy team, I helped develop ECI's positioning, target audience definition, value proposition, emotional and functional benefits framework, and the foundational culture brand statement that would anchor all subsequent communications and creative work.
Social Media Strategy: I spearheaded ECI's social media strategy — leading the development of platform-specific approaches, content themes, tone, posting cadence, visual identity guidelines, and a phased implementation roadmap.
Market Activation Planning: I contributed to the activation planning work designed to establish ECI's name recognition across Greater Houston's multicultural communities, covering campaign structure, budget allocation, performance metrics, and coordination across ECI's member network.

Key Contributions:

Delivered the foundational research that the entire brand strategy was built on, including the member organization audit and the adjacent landscape analysis.
Helped surface ECI's core strategic insight — that the coalition had quietly built one of Houston's most comprehensive cross-cultural navigation systems — and translated that finding into the positioning and messaging that defined the brand strategy phase.
Spearheaded the social media strategy, leading the translation of the team's brand work into a platform-by-platform content and engagement framework ready for implementation.

The Outcome: The engagement moved ECI through a full Brand Evaluation, Brand Strategy, and Activation Planning process — taking the coalition from an under-defined coordination network to an organization with a clear strategic identity, a unified positioning, and a concrete roadmap for establishing visibility across Greater Houston's 1.6+ million multicultural residents.

Why This Project Showcases My Skills: ECI presented a unique research challenge: a client whose value was real and substantial, but largely invisible — even to itself. Translating interviews, competitive data, and coalition dynamics into a coherent picture of what ECI actually was and what it could become required both analytical rigor and genuine sensitivity to the communities involved. Contributing across the research, strategy, and activation phases of the same engagement also reflects the kind of end-to-end involvement that's rare in a researcher role.

UrbanSim: Brand Evaluation for an Urban Planning Platform in Transition

Client: UrbanSim | UrbanSim.com

The Challenge: UrbanSim, a pioneer in urban simulation technology with over two decades of experience, was at a pivotal crossroads: transitioning from a consulting-based business model to a SaaS subscription platform. With sophisticated AI-driven modeling tools used by metropolitan planning organizations, city departments, and private-sector developers worldwide, their core challenge wasn't capability — it was communication. Their brand, rooted in academic rigor and technical excellence, wasn't translating to the broader market audiences they needed to reach in order to scale.

My Role and Approach: As Lead Market Researcher, I contributed to several key research streams as part of a broader team effort to produce a comprehensive brand evaluation:

Online Brand Diagnostic: I led a systematic examination of UrbanSim's full digital footprint — analyzing search performance, social media presence, website UI/UX, and public reviews — to surface how the brand was actually being perceived versus how it intended to be seen.
Competitive Landscape Analysis: I mapped the urban planning software market, from dominant players like Esri's CityEngine and Sidewalk Labs to emerging tools like Plexscape and ArcGIS Urban, identifying where UrbanSim held defensible advantages and where it was losing visibility.
Stakeholder Interviews: I participated in a subset of the 11 interviews conducted across internal staff and customer organizations — including metropolitan planning organizations and city departments spanning the U.S., Canada, and Australia — helping capture both team perspectives and the lived experience of users in the field.
Synthesis & Recommendations: I supported the strategy team in applying the 8-Point Synthesis framework and translating research findings into prioritized recommendations, including a dual-track implementation plan balancing urgent strategic transformation with near-term wins.

Key Contributions:

Delivered the online brand diagnostic and competitive landscape analysis that became core pillars of the evaluation.
Helped surface the central tension in UrbanSim's brand — strong academic credibility that inadvertently created barriers to broader adoption — clearly enough to anchor the team's strategic recommendations.
Contributed research that informed the top-priority findings: the need to crystallize a brand narrative accessible to both technical and non-technical audiences, develop modular product architecture, and build an employee value proposition to protect institutional knowledge during the SaaS transition.

The Outcome: The Brand Evaluation and Strategic Recommendations report served as UrbanSim's roadmap entering their growth phase. Though the engagement concluded at the evaluation stage — before moving into brand strategy development and design — the deliverable was comprehensive enough to stand on its own as an actionable strategic asset.

Why This Project Showcases My Skills: UrbanSim was a technically elite organization trying to broaden its reach without losing what made it credible. Contributing research in that context — and communicating findings clearly to a leadership team of researchers and PhDs — required both analytical precision and an ability to translate complexity into something decision-makers could actually act on. It's a strong example of how I operate as a collaborative research contributor on high-stakes, specialized engagements.

Image: Blackribbit