Laura Khoudari / Lifting Heavy Things
She had the voice — the category-defining book on strength training and trauma recovery. The engagement built the architecture: from trauma-informed fitness practitioner to trauma-informed wellness author, speaker, and thought leader, without losing the audience she’d already earned.
Five engagements, 2022–2023.
The engagement
“Going freelance and building Mildred Mae has been (and continues to be) really, really hard. I’ve also experienced surprising moments of delight… One of those clients is an incredible woman named Laura Khoudari… What made it powerfully rewarding was working with a client whose values aligned with my own, and helping her bring something good and necessary into the world in a bigger way.”
— Strands of Genius, June 2023
Who Laura is, and what the ask was
Author, speaker, certified personal trainer, trauma-informed wellness practitioner. Lifting Heavy Things defined a category that didn’t exist: strength training as part of trauma recovery. The ask was to establish Laura as a trauma-informed wellness author, practitioner, and thought leader. The challenge behind the ask came down to one word: she was known as a trauma-informed fitness practitioner, and fitness is not wellness. The gap between those two words was the whole strategy problem.
The engagement arc
One client, five separate engagements
Laura came back four times. The first engagement, spring and summer 2022, was research and strategy — social listening, audience segmentation, category research, channel and content audits — with the six-hour brand workshop on October 1, 2022 as the pivotal session and the full brand strategy delivered that November. Everything after was new work she returned for, none of it in the original agreement: a naming audit in January 2023 (build on her own name or a created brand; her own name won), then visual identity and a website redesign built with Leah Thomason Bromberg, then ongoing collateral into spring 2023.
The discovery
Four lenses, four truths
The strategy ran on the four-lens discovery that now defines the practice — brand, category, audience, culture — and this engagement is where that method ran first. Each lens ended in a written truth:
Brand. Wellness is as unique and personal as trauma, and cannot be reached without first navigating through and accepting one’s own darkness.
Category. An oversaturated, over-generalized, and under-representative wellness market has led to wellness fatigue. The industry is in dire need of new voices with profound, inclusive, and personal perspectives.
Audience. Personal priorities are shaped more by worldly definitions than by individual truths. She’s caught between societal expectations and her desire to identify — and live out — her own truths.
Culture. The cascade of today’s collective traumas makes it easier for people to minimize their own experiences.
The spark
Truth hides in darkness.
The category answers darkness with matcha smoothies, lavender-scented candles, and sunrise hikes in $125 leggings. The strategy went the other way: recognizing, exploring, and confronting the shadow self is the only route to a definition of wellness that’s actually yours. In Laura’s own words from the workshop:
“You need to navigate into and confront the darkness before you can move into the space where you’re living your life according to your own definition of wellness.”
The strategic vision
The vision it produced, in full:
Get
Wellness professionals, influencers, and seekers
Who
Are tired and overwhelmed by superficial, one-size-fits-all approaches to wellness that contribute to the continued stigmatization of anyone who doesn’t fit the mold
To
Learn about and experience the transformative power of defining and evolving their own unique approach to wellness through Laura
By
Illuminating the truth that one can only live a lifestyle aligned with their unique vision of wellness by acknowledging, confronting, and validating their shadow selves.
The reason to believe was Laura herself: her own journey — her shadow work — sitting at the intersection of professional expertise and personal experience. When the subject is trauma, trust is established through vulnerability; the credential is having walked it.
The workshop
Six hours, one room
“I have been hung on every word so far for these over three hours. And it wasn’t that you were boring me… You’ll hold my hand and I will follow you.”
— Laura Khoudari, October 1, 2022
The strategy, in the client’s words
“The two words of, like, intuition and data stand out. I see them in my head. And I was, like, she’s really data driven.”
— Laura Khoudari, January 20, 2023
The art-plus-science engine, named back to me by the client.
Identity and website
Decisions sequenced so Laura made the ones that mattered
By February 2023 the strategy was a visual system, built with Leah. Logo first, then font, then color — the pancake metaphor — so each choice narrowed the next instead of competing with it.
“Dude — also a tote bag and my tablecloth. I love my logo!!!”
— Laura Khoudari
What this credentials
Multi-stage work, one discipline
Multi-stage engagements. Senior practice scaled to a founder. Brand, creative, and web as one discipline rather than three handoffs. The four-lens discovery that later ran Clinique and Ligare ran here first. And the client recognizing the work back to the practice, in her own words.
And a brand whose whole subject is coming home to your own body — for a practice built on the idea that belonging is a threshold you find the key to, the most on-thesis engagement on this page.