LAURA KHOUDARI · LIFTING HEAVY THINGS
How does an author reach a new audience without losing her current one?
Laura already had a voice and a category-defining book. The work built the architecture for her to grow from trauma-informed fitness practitioner into author, speaker, and wellness thought leader — without asking the audience who trusted her first to follow a different person.
THE PROBLEM
Laura was known for trauma-informed fitness — and fitness had become smaller than her work.
THE MOVE
One integrated build: brand, creative, social, and website, handled as one job.
THE RECEIPT
One client. Five engagements. The proof is the relationship.
ROLE
Strategy consultant across multiple engagements.
REMIT
Research & Discovery · Integrated brand, social, and creative strategy · Brand identity · Website strategy & development · Naming audit
PARTNER CREDIT
Web and visual design by Leah Thomason Bromberg.
THE PROBLEM
Fitness had become smaller than her work.
Laura was known as a trauma-informed fitness practitioner. Her book, Lifting Heavy Things, and point of view had already moved into a wider conversation about embodiment, healing, power, and self-defined wellness.
Her brand needed to make that expansion legible without discarding the specificity that made her credible.
THE DISCOVERY
Four guiding truths the discovery revealed.
01 · BRAND
Laura’s authority came from both lived experience and trained, practiced expertise.
02 · CATEGORY
An oversaturated, over-generalized, and under-representative wellness industry had led to a sense of wellness fatigue.
03 · AUDIENCE
Personal priorities are shaped more by worldly definitions than by individual truths.
04 · CULTURE
The cascade of today’s collective traumas was making it easier for people to minimize their own experiences.
THE STRATEGIC SPARK
The category answers darkness with matcha smoothies, lavender-scented candles, and sunrise hikes in $125 leggings.
The four truths revealed the unexpected connection the brand needed: recognizing, exploring, and confronting the shadow self is the only route to an honest definition of wellness that’s actually yours.
THE BUILD
One client. Five engagements.
Discovery & brand workshop
Multi-lens category, audience, and cultural framing — plus a 6-hour brand workshop to develop Laura’s brand vision, mission, and purpose.
0102Brand, creative, and social strategy
An integrated strategy including the spark, overarching strategic vision, and how to bring it to life — from content strategy to comms framework.
Brand identity and website
The strategy translated into a visual system and full brand website built around Laura’s wider role.
0304Naming audit
How Laura’s name, book, and evolving offers should work together.
Applications
Collateral and practical extensions that made the identity useful beyond the content.
05The category answers darkness with matcha smoothies, lavender-scented candles, and sunrise hikes in $125 leggings.
The four truths revealed the unexpected connection the brand needed: recognizing, exploring, and confronting the shadow self is the only route to an honest definition of wellness that’s actually yours.
THE RECEIPTS
The proof is the relationship.
“At this point, I think you all really get me.” — Laura Khoudari
“Oh, I’m so excited. I love this.”
Discovery & brand workshop · October 2022“I have shared your presentation with a few folks and we are all excited.”
Brand, creative, and social strategy · December 2022“I love these palettes. I want to wear palette one and decorate with the other.”
Brand identity · February 2023“It looks incredible.”
Website · April 2023“This is better than what I was envisioning!”
Applications · June 2023“What made this engagement so 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.”
Elisabeth, in a Strands of Genius interview about working with Laura
Multi-stage work, one discipline
Multi-stage engagements. Senior practice scaled to a founder. Brand, creative, social, and web design handled as one job.
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 — of everything in the portfolio, the engagement closest to what this practice is for.
