Singing Praises to Loren: Helping Me Sort Through MySELF and My Brand
I realized I wasn't just needing to relaunch my brand, but I needed to relaunch my SELF too. Had I known how complicated it would be, I may have chickened out, but what was calling me was calling me, and I semi-sleepwalked through the process while juggling photo shoots and back-and-forth trips to Chicago. This process came at the tail end of a tumultuous four years that resulted from moving back to the Midwest after 23 years in California.
Not surprisingly, this former Deadhead rediscovered herself and her CA-WOO in California and wanted to bring a little bit back to the shores of Lake Michigan. I knew I wanted where I was going with my photography to reflect where I was going with my life. Lots of this process and future aspirations I will share within this blog, under the umbrella of my given name, Julie Mikos, representing where I've been, where I am, and where I want to go.
The photo brand I'm retiring, I've loved and will love for all of time. For one thing, it so beautifully represented the simplicity of me and how I wanted to primarily tell wedding stories with my photos. It's classic, beautiful, fresh. Just like my photography was and how I like to view myself. Silver was the color of my toenails for many years and became the color of my brand.
How did this brand last so long for me? Because someone I love dearly, one of my absolute besties, created it for me. It came from love and deep understanding, and I will forever be grateful to my dear friend Laurel Segel.
Of course, I asked Laurel if she would help me design my new brand, but she could probably see right away that I had a crazy vision with three brands and on and on, and my nervous system was a complete wreck from more than a few years of chaos. Plus, she was about to embark on several weeks of travel and said she could talk about it in the fall.
I realized I needed to launch a whole new brand and site right after Labor Day. Not just to prepare for 2027 bookings, but also to really look at myself and how I wanted to walk through this new life in Michigan. Who am I and where am I headed with my career? What's next? That's a LOT to sort through. Not to mention sorting through 100,000 photos to create a master portfolio from twenty years of shooting.
Into my life walked Loren. She was recommended by another dear friend, and as much as I love AI for help with some things, it will never replace actual human friend referrals.
Loren is herself cultivating multiple brands, juggling her creative business (Level Up With Loren) and well-being pursuits (Zen House Retreats), and I could tell from our first call that she could see clearly through my jangled nervous system and could talk me through, helping me decipher what it was that I was trying to get out.
And she did it.
I wanted something ethereal. I wanted something that could cross three brands, I wanted something that demonstrated the connectedness of all of us. Somehow through my Pinterest board of watercolored mycelium and the cosmic web (I told you I went California WOO), she led me through the wormhole to help me launch my Third Act.
Loren was patient when, midway through, I decided I needed to prioritize marketing my photography, and we shifted together. We worked through our slight disagreements and kept the immense project on track together by screen-sharing through virtual calls a handful of times during the process, and when things clicked, they clicked.
It was a beautiful process, and I really couldn't have found a better person who could understand this metamorphosis I'm trying to achieve. I don’t just love the custom artwork she created for my logo mark—it touched me deeply.
So, with this, I'm singing the praises, I'm writing a love letter to Loren and Laurel and all those patient creatives out there. The stories we tell, the art we bring to the world, will be appreciated by you, one or many. Get it out there. Collaborate and send multitudes of Thank Yous and Love Letters in the process. And praises to photographer Amber Shumake who took the beautiful brand photos of Loren in the slideshow above!
Thanks, Loren. I'm so proud to launch my new brand.
XXOO J
