Scaling Creative Ops Amid Explosive Growth
2024 / OLIPOP
I oversaw all creative operations at OLIPOP during a time when the brand was evolving from a small startup into a major CPG player.
As Head of Creative, I partnered with the Head of Marketing, reported to the CEO, and directly managed OLIPOP’s internal creative team and its external creative partners. During my tenure, brand awareness, consideration, and trial grew considerably. Sales grew from $200M to $500M+.
A lot can happen in a year. But instead of talking executionally, let’s focus on the operational choices I made to tackle OLIPOP’s big creative problem: rapidly scaling without dropping the ball.
You see, OLIPOP’s explosive growth made its short and long-term goals change on a weekly basis.
To meet the brand’s ever-changing priorities, I focused on building an operational infrastructure that was flexible enough to address daily strategic pivots—and robust enough to efficiently scale creative operations from a $200M business to a $2B one.
The brand’s challenges were wonderfully clear
Brand confusion caused by hyper competition and category growth.
Inconsistent marketing messaging stemming from rapid growth and leadership turnover.
Inadequate operational processes that were undefined and unprepared to scale.
Low morale within creative department from misallocation and overallocation.
My approach required a mix of management styles
Consolidated brand identity to combat brand confusion and inconsistent marketing.
Defined target audience to focus marketing strategy.
Segmented workflow to eliminate bottlenecks, rectify allocations, and enable scaling.
Defined basic, scalable creative processes and ensured their adoption with high-touch involvement.
Established clear creative standards to develop talent, reward success, and improve morale.
Our results laid the foundation for scalable growth
Increased target market by 40% and refocused department on strategy.
Refined brand positioning and created OLIPOP’s first 3-year creative plan.
30% increase in brand awareness.
15% increase in consideration.
15% increase in trial.
Increased creative capabilities by doubling the size of the department and adding new capabilities.
Increased creative quality, consistency, and efficiency with improved workflow and standardized creative process.
Created OLIPOP’s first creative talent development plan.
How we executed
Unifying OLIPOP’s brand identity to tackle brand confusion, hyper competition & category growth
The brand’s visual language and tone of voice was fractured and inconsistent.
Brand awareness was lacking and brand confusion was on the rise. Inconsistency was making the brand harder to recognize, and copycats brands were muddying the water with similar brand names, design, and messaging.
It needed to scale, but wasn’t built for it. The speed of the brand’s growth encouraged iterative, not systematic design. It solved for the challenge of the day—not future challenges like major retailers’ scaled technical demands.
To create differentiation, we consolidated and refined legacy creative.
To create scalability, we improved technical efficiency.
Consolidated: From a whole mess of logos to one core wordmark
Hypercompetition and brand confusion meant multiple logos were a liability. We selected our most well-known logo and altered slightly to make it easier (and faster) to lay out.
Before: More than four logos
After: One logo
Refined: From many fragmented voices to a single recognizable tone
With OLIPOP’s new target audience in mind (more on that in the next section), we sorted through all the copy the brand had ever ran and identified the 3 tonal themes that had been persistently successful: Playfully simple, sensory-rich, and quietly confident.
Before: Fragmented tone & personality
After: One approachable tone
Consolidated: From a library of SKU-led colors to a flexible brand-led palette.
OLIPOP’s huge variety of flavors created a ton of color consistency and production issues that harmed awareness, recall, and at times, differentiation too. We established a more functional color palette that defined how future colors could be developed.
Before: Color confusion
After: Core brand colors
Refined: From mandatory typesetting to systematic design direction
Increasing workload and technical complexity made bespoke layout design hugely inefficient. We established typographic guidelines and templates for multichannel use, using legacy typography to preserve equity.
Before: bespoke typesetting for every single layout
After: rules & guidelines
Creative Team:
Design by Shanna Shu & Amia Melian. Art Direction by Allyssa Pauker & Casey Burns. UX Design by Lexy Garcia.
Copywriting by Allie Carr & Madeline Talt Soules. Design Direction by Kristopher Delaney, Cristian Vargas.
Refining OLIPOP’s Brand position
to increases its audience by 40%
Our messaging was inconsistent because our proposition was creatively challenging
No one wants health advice from a soda company. OLIPOP’s health claims were industry-leading but weren’t great at driving awareness, trial, and consideration…especially with so many copycats.
Our health claims worked great as RTBs.
Research showed that OLIPOP’s key brand values resonated with ALL soda-lovers—not just the health-conscious, the dieters, or Gen Z.
We found a better brand proposition. Providing wholesome comfort worked on a lot of levels: It was desirable to our new audience abd was differentiated from both direct category and growth category competitors.
To expand our audience we redefined our proposition: Wholesome Comfort.
To bring Wholesome Comfort to life, we launched the “Unlikely Friends” campaign.
The “Unlikely Friends” campaign featured a Millennial + Boomer cast and marked OLIPOP’s largest TV campaign to date—debuting during the 2024 Summer Olympics on local networks.
OLIPOP’s biggest TV campaign ever
The multigenerational viewership of the Olympics proved to be a more efficient placement for OLIPOP’s audience. While competitors struggled to sustain interest in health claims and demographic trends, OLIPOP enjoyed sustained awareness growth for the remainder of 2025.
The simple comfort of a nostalgic soda moment resonated with a larger audience and established OLIPOP as a friendly, accessible brand—not an exclusive youth brand for health nuts.
Sustained effects
“Unlikely Friends” campaign credits:
Research & Strategy by Squint Consulting.
Creative Direction by Allyssa Pauker and Allie Carr. Produced by Olivia Baker.
Directed by Daniel Wolfe. Edited by Louisa Phillips. Composed by Butter. Sound design by Mr. Bronx.
Introducing social strategy to OLIPOP to
increase audience, awareness, & differentiation
Our social content was successful but off-target and off-brand.
Social’s approach was successful, but limited. Despite very little resources OLIPOP’s social media team had built a best-in-class relationship with Gen Z girlies. But our content didn’t resonate with other targets.
We had limited awareness and poor differentiation. Our content was too culturally specific to court our expanded audience, and trend-chasing was diluting the brand.
It was time for strategy. OLIPOP was a young brand that had been totally fine operating entirely on instinct. But the time had come to adopt a more strategic way or operating.
We introduced social strategy to increase awareness and differentiation.
But to court our new target without losing our existing fanbase, that strategy had to bridge both audiences.
First: Cutting everything that didn’t serve the brand
While developing strategy, we audited all platforms and removed audience-exclusive content. We then reinvested in the remaining well-branded, high-performing series with broader appeal.
But even as we cut back, we preserved and strengthened the small-brand persona that had drawn fans to us before. Our ambassadors began to link OLIPOP’s social to its real world presence more, using their celebrated tone to connect social more closely with the master brand.
Next: Bridging the gap between Wholesome Comfort & Gen Z using nostalgic vibes
To bridge the gap between our existing tone of voice and our new Wholesome Comfort positioning, we relied on one of the brand’s most enduring creative themes: Nostalgia.
Nostalgia gave us a broader tone of voice than before. It could express Wholesome Comfort in a way that felt fresh and exciting for Gen Z girlies and at the same time, warm and familiar for older audiences.
And then: Data-driven content to bring social closer to the brand
As the team became acclimated to strategy, we included more and more content driven by research and strategic insights.
We experimented with content inspired by audience data, like carousels featuring a top consumption occasion (like an afternoon work slump) or posts that connect the product more closely with multigenerational trends.
Plus: Partner content transforms social into a powerful brand steward
OLIPOP’s popularity meant we had no shortage of interested partners, and being a young brand, we pretty much said yes to any partner opportunity that came knocking.
This made for a wide array of very random creative, which we used to make social the live testing ground of our new Wholesome Comfort position and evolving brand guidelines.
Social was shifting from one of the least brand-centric channels into one of the most impactful sources of brand stewardship.
Social Team:
Social Strategy, Production, Content Management, concept development, and Copywriting by Izzy Yellin.
Art Direction by Sami Cronk. Copywriting by Luna Alatorre.
Barbie partnership Creative DIrection by: Courtney Bowditch & Alex Behles
Defining processes, segmenting workflow & doing whatever I could to make creative ops scalable
Operational processes were inadequate, and we weren’t ready to scale
Operational processes needed to evolve.
OLIPOP’s creative processes were more like a scrappy startup’s than a corporation, but the brand’s success demanded much more organization.
Workflow dysfunction was widespread. Creative processes were mostly undefined or created by people who were unfamiliar with technical processes. Misallocation, overallocation, and technical gaps were rampant.
Creative ops were unprepared to scale. All creative work was trafficked without strategy and with very little project management. We were not prepared to scale, let alone competently handle our existing workload.
To improve workflow, we segmented the department.
To allow scaling, we set basic creative processes and added new capabilities.
Segmenting one generalized input into three creative disciplines
All creative work in the org flowed through a single generalized creative department, creating a massive bottleneck.
Segmenting the department into expertise-driven workflows increased output and quality while laying the foundation for scaling.
Introducing formal creative processes & strategic standards
Where once OLIPOP’s scrappy startup practices had solved problems quickly, now projects suffered from subjective priorities, lack of strategy, and staff misallocation.
Establishing clear intake procedure, strategic requirements, stakeholder roles, and performance standards greatly improved efficiency, quality, morale and—you guessed it—scalablity.
Increasing creative
capabilities & adding
new specializations
OLIPOP’s creative needs were ever-growing, but we weren’t prepared for them or our existing workload.
We doubled the size of the creative department, added a middle-management tier, and added new technical capabilities (like in-house production). Our output and quality increased dramatically, and new specializations increased scalability.
Getting very high-touch across the entire org
For a young startup that was used to a lot of autonomy, introducing formal creative process felt restrictive and dictatorial.
To assist understanding and adoption of our new workflow, I got deeply involved in day-to-day execution.
I worked alongside creative staff through the transition, providing personal support and executional assistance. I guided cross-functional partners of all levels through our process, demonstrating how it could benefit them.
Created OLIPOP’s first
3-year creative plan
I won’t share that here for confidentiality reasons, but suffice to say it was essentially a growth plan based on business and marketing objectives that included KPIs, messaging strategy, design strategy, creative platforms, and workforce planning.
Operations team:
Chad Wilson, Head of Marketing. Lauren Hopton, Sr. Manager Marketing Operations.
Kristofer Delaney, Design Director. Andrea Hyde, Director Design Studio.
And last but not least: Mentorship
Definitely my favorite part of the job
After years of inconsistent leadership, creative staff had grown accustomed to decreasing oversight, increasing expectations, and sporadic support.
Morale was low.
Creative staff felt abandoned.
I increased facetime, individually and as a group.
I set weekly one-on-ones to provide regular two-way performance reviews. Bi-weekly creative department meetings focused on team building through shared problem solving and creative inspiration sharing.
Creatives operated with little confidence in their leadership or themselves. They acted with anxiety and fear, often suppressing their expertise to placate shifting stakeholders.
Expertise was getting suppressed.
I established creative roles and expectations.
As part of our weekly one-on-ones, I established and reiterated creative standards and expectations for each individual staff member. I explained concrete actions I would take to support them achieving those expectations. As a result, staff capability and capacity rose significantly.
In a company growing as rapidly as OLIPOP, employees often feel like they’re either riding the wave or being crushed by it. With no clear advocates, creative staff felt uncertain about their futures in the company and weren’t sure how to prepare for oncoming changes.
Career paths were unclear.
I established OLIPOP’s first creative talent development plan.
Without going into too much detail, I created a growth plan for the department and for each staff member. I provided enthusiastic mentorship to all staff, helping the most ambitious create progressive goals and the helping the ones that weren’t interested in managing develop their skills.
If you liked this work,
you might also like the
people who worked on it.
Chad Wilson, Head of Marketing
Allyssa Pauker, Creative Direction
Allie Carr, Creative Direction
Mad Talt Soules, Copywriting
Shanna Shu, Art Direction & Design
Amia Melian, Art Direction & Design
Izzy Yellin, Social Strategy, Community Management, & Production
Sami Cronk, Art Direction & Design
Luna Alatorre, Social Copywriting
Lexy Garcia, UX Design
Alex Behles, Creative Direction
Courtney Bowditch, Creative Direction
Casey Burns, Art Direction & Design
Kristofer Delaney, Design Direction
Andrea Hyde, Director Design Studio
Sarah Leidy Kelly, Director of Integrated Media
Steven Vigilante, Director of Strategic Partnerships
Marjorie Mella, Director of Public Relations
Paige Nasis, Director of Influencer
Michelle Paulhus, Director of E-Commerce & Retention
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