How I stopped people-pleasing my way through branding my own business.

There’s an awkward irony in being a branding and content specialist whose own brand no longer feels quite right.

Sort of like being a barber with a questionable haircut. (I’ve seen ’em. You’ve seen ’em. Let’s leave it there.)

You know something needs doing. In fact, you know exactly what needs doing. But somehow, like Michael Scott with an office full of people to distract, you keep finding something else that apparently requires your immediate attention.

That, mi lords and mi ladies, was me to a T with Copy Wave Creative.

A name that made sense at the time

When I first ventured into the feral frontier of freelancing, Copy Wave Creative did what I needed her to do.

I came up with the name on a long, coastal summer walk. Headphone-free, for approximately the first time in 15 years. Left unattended, my brain had apparently decided we were naming a business.

I looked out at the sea.

Ahh, waves. WAVE.

Groundbreaking stuff from the English Lit graduate.

But there was a deeper meaning in there somewhere. (Pun very much intended.) Waves create movement. They make an impact. And copywriting was the service I initially thought would earn me the most money.

Copy. Wave.

Chuck “Creative” on the end to accommodate social media and whatever else I inevitably got my mitts into, and voilà. She was born.

For a while, she did the job. I built a lil’ client base, got some £s in the bank and started figuring out what running my own business actually looked like beyond naming it on a walk.

The more I worked with local businesses, though, the more I realised that some of my favourite work happened before I’d written a single word of their content.

It was the talking. The research. The digging around in the deepest crevices of a business, asking questions that occasionally sent us wildly off-topic before revealing the very thing we’d been trying to get to.

Mum and Dad gave me a pretty useful skill for this kinda vocation: being a good listener.

And when I actually listened — then questioned, prodded and connected a few dots — founders would stop and say:

“I’ve never really thought about it like that.”

Those were the moments I wanted more of.

The tiny details, peculiar habits, stubborn opinions and brilliant stories had often been sitting there all along. They’d just become so familiar to the person running the business that they no longer seemed worth mentioning.

Meanwhile, I’d be scribbling away, wondering why on EARTH we weren’t telling people about this.

Then it hit me like a shopping trolley to the ankles.

I wasn’t simply interested in making businesses sound better. I wanted to understand what made them worth listening to in the first place — and weave that through everything we created afterwards.

Somewhere along the way, Copy Wave Creative started feeling a little too small for what I was building.

Perfectly respectable. Slightly suffocating

Here’s the thing about branding.

You can have a perfectly respectable name, a profesh-looking logo and a colour palette that behaves itself beautifully, and still find yourself staring at the whole lot thinking:

Why doesn’t this feel like me?

Because your brand comes through in far more than the logo at the top of your website. It’s there in the way you write, the ideas you share, the details you make a fuss about and the opinions you’re willing to put your name to.

And when those things don’t feel at home in the brand you’ve created, putting yourself out there becomes a bit of an identity-crisis-shaped ordeal.

Copy Wave wasn’t a baaaaaad brand.

But I’d developed bigger opinions, broader ambitions and a much clearer idea of the work I wanted to be known for. I wanted to show more of the curiosity, humour and imagination that went into doing it.

And I was trying to squeeze all of that into an identity I’d created for an earlier version of myself, based on what I thought people wanted from me. (I’m a Libra. People-pleasing is practically an extracurricular activity of mine.)

Somehow, I’d landed on “I’d be delighted to discuss your investment portfolio. Here’s a complimentary fountain pen.”

(I genuinely don’t know what I was thinking.)

Like the jeans I bought at 18 and tried to squeeze back into the other day, it was a rather uncomfortable fit.

And I wanted room to breathe. To play. To build something around what actually excited me, without constantly wondering whether it looked sufficiently business-like.

The funny thing is, I’d already started doing that with twenny smthn, my lifestyle brand. There was more of me in there. More personality, more curiosity, more audacity, more bravery, more authenticity, more freedom to follow an idea I truly loved and believed and give it legs to run.

I wanted my work to have a home that felt like that, too.

I already had the name.

smthn grew out of twenny smthn, my lifestyle brand.

So this wasn’t a name I’d plucked from the sky during a particularly productive shower. It came from something I’d already created that felt much more like me: somewhere I could write, explore ideas and give my creativity a bit of room to play.

I wanted my business to feel like that, too.

I didn’t want to introduce myself as a copywriter or social media person and immediately start mentally listing all the things that description left out.

The strategy. The questions. The slightly obsessive interest in why somebody does something a particular way. The joy of finding a story they’ve been sitting on for YEARS and helping them see what it’s worth.

smthn gave me space for all of it.

And the name held a belief that had become increasingly central to my work:

Every business has something worth saying.

Not necessarily something earth-shattering. You don’t need to have reinvented the wheel or overcome seventeen consecutive near-death experiences to have an interesting story.

Sometimes it’s a wonderfully odd detail. An unpopular opinion. A decision that makes very little commercial sense on paper but means everything to the person who made it.

Sometimes it’s a story a founder tells almost apologetically, having decided on everyone else’s behalf that it’s probably not that interesting.

Meanwhile, I’m three pages into my notes.

That’s the stuff I’m drawn to. Listening, noticing, questioning and connecting the dots, then figuring out how to tell the story so people actually give a shit.

I wanted a brand I felt excited to do that through. One I could keep building as my ideas and ambitions grew, without having to apologise for spilling over the edges.

A little room to breathe.

I think this is where a lot of businesses get stuck.

You create an identity when you’re starting out, working with what you know about yourself and what you think the business will become. Of course you do. Nobody hands you a crystal ball with your first invoice template.

Or you look around your industry, figure out what credibility apparently looks like and dress accordingly.

Then you spend a few years doing the work. You learn what you’re good at, what your customers value and what you’d happily talk about until somebody gently suggests going home.

But the brand stays where you left it.

Before long, you’re second-guessing captions, sanding down opinions and removing the very sentence that sounded most like you because it doesn’t feel quite “on brand”.

Which is a bit bloody backwards when it’s your brand.

It should give your passion and creativity somewhere to go. Somewhere to put the ideas, convictions and peculiar little details that make your business yours.

That doesn’t mean everyone needs orange branding, a mouth on them or an enthusiastic relationship with the caps lock key.

Some businesses are naturally quiet. Some are measured, reassuring and beautifully understated. If that reflects the people behind them and the experience they offer, wonderful.

But there’s something exhausting about building a business you care deeply about, then feeling you have to become somebody else every time you talk about it.

I wanted to spend more of that energy creating things.

So, was it worth it?

For me, absolutely.

Changing the name didn’t magically change the business. The work, the thinking and the person doing both were already there.

But having an identity that could hold all of that made me want to share more of it. I could write something, have an idea or follow a slightly unexpected creative impulse without immediately wondering whether I needed to put its sensible shoes on first.

smthn felt like an extension of something I’d already begun with twenny smthn: making space for the things I cared about and seeing what I could create with them.

Copy Wave Creative helped me get started. I’m grateful to her for that.

But I don’t need to keep breathing in just because she used to fit.

If you’ve been feeling a similar squeeze, it’s worth asking yourself what’s changed. Is your brand still a fair reflection of the business you’re building? Does it help you express what makes it special? Do you actually enjoy putting it out into the world?

You might need a few adjustments. You might need a much bigger rethink.

Personally, I needed to undo the button.

And put down the complimentary fountain pen!