Alicia Nagel Creative featured in "The Change-Makers: Stories That Inspire" | Orlando Voyager

I was delighted to have my entreprenerial story and Alicia Nagel Creative featured by Orlando Voyager magazine in their section, "The Change-Makers: Stories That Inspire." The article is below or you can read it here.

Local Stories | March 4, 2026 | ORLANDO VOYAGER

Meet Alicia Nagel of Alicia Nagel Creative, LLC

Today we’d like to introduce you to Alicia.

Hi Alicia, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?

I’m most fired up by creativity with a mission. Design is not art. Art doesn’t need a reason to exist – it can exist simply because the artist wanted to create something. However, design exists to communicate something. It has a job to do. And if a design is not successfully communicating the intended message, then I don’t care how pretty it is – it’s failing at its job. As a designer, I love this challenge.

I’ve always been fascinated by what makes people tick – our motivations, why we do what we do, why we behave and act a certain way, and make the micro decisions that we do to shape our lives. I feel like I had clarity about what I wanted to do at an early age although I didn’t know the name of it yet. When I went to college, the word “branding” was just starting to be uttered. I remember being at a networking event in my 20’s and when I said I did branding, and some older guy said, “Does it hurt?” and those around us snickered.

At some point, branding became a “thing”. In my twenties I worked at a multi-disciplinary design firm in LA. After I’d been there a couple years, I remember the owners of the firm bringing me into their office and telling me they were going to rename the Graphics Studio to the Brand Experience Studio, and they wanted to change my title to be Brand Storyteller because they were convinced that my brain just worked that way. And they were right! I really felt seen. They gave me the license to came up with a brand strategy discovery process, which is the roots of my process today, and we started to put it to work for our clients at the design firm. My brand strategy informed not just graphic design projects, but it also served as a unifying strategic creative inspiration behind architecture, interior design, and landscape projects that the firm did as well.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?

I mean, is it ever a smooth road? And isn’t the less travelled path the one lined with flowers and stories to tell later? I graduated from Boston University in 2002 when the dot com crash was raging, so jobs were incredibly scarce. I remember I got selected for a NYC ad agency tour where BU paraded their top soon-to-be graduates around to agencies for hiring, but the job market was so dry that as a joke I printed instructions on the back of my resume on how to fold it into a paper airplane and throw it out the window – because no one was hiring. It got me noticed and some chuckles, but none of us got job offers. My first design job out of college was working in the second-level basement of a hospital for a commercial printer who had a satellite office there to serve the medical staff. Definintely not a glamorous job or workplace, but we had fun and I learned a lot about how to prepare files for print – I still love designing packaging and print items. Another big hurdle was when in 2008, I started my business amidst the “Great Recession” of 2007-2009 in a city where I had just moved and had zero network. So those were fun times to be starting out!

The advertising, marketing, and design industry sector as a whole is also one of constant evolution and upheaval. Each of these has rocked the industry: junior design jobs being outsourced to overseas workers; Canva’s democratization of design via templates; the maturation of drag-and-drop website builders; and the current AI revolution. The one constant I can rely on, is there will always be another tool to learn. Consumer sentiments will always evolve. The SEO algorithms will always change. And client budgets will always expand and shrink with the economy. The best thing I’ve found to do to be resilient is to simply always be learning, and truly invest in providing strategic value to clients. Because at the end of the day, someone overseas may be able to build you a website, but they probably will not be able to wrap their head around your unique business problems to make that website strategically push your goals forward. And a business owner can use AI to write up a marketing plan, but they lack the ability to scrutinize it and refine it into something that’s truly going to move the needle for them. A business owner might be able to leverage Canva templates to DIY their social posting, but the moment they want to tweak the design or make it feel on-brand, they may muddy it into a visual mess. There is truly no replacement for experience, strategy, or persuasive and beautiful design. I try to make sure that what I offer can not be commoditized. That is my plan for not just survival, but thrive-al! Subject to change of course – but that is at the core of what I’m sayin. I feel like you’ve got to keep your eyes on the horizon and be ready to shift gears.

Overwork and overwhelm are definitely challenges for any entrepreneur. For a long time, I felt reassured by my overflowing to-do list and long workdays because they proved that I was trying my hardest and deserved success. I fell into the trap of believing that success was only valid if there was suffering involved. But at some point, I moved from Portland, OR to Hawai’i, which was my home for seven years and it changed my perspective. Encountering the concept of Aloha changed my mindset. I learned that the Spirit of Aloha is a whole philosophy, not just a greeting. In many ways, it defies translation, but I’ll do my best to try to scratch the surface! Aloha involves an alignment of mind and heart. It is a state of being that requires one to be present, and not only to respect others, but to respect the earth and yourself too. It encourages you to have patience – for others and for yourself. It inspired me to still be ambitious, but not burn my candle at both ends. I realized I could be driven without being utterly drained of everything I had to give. Aloha gave me permission to slow down and savor the journey. This shift didn’t remove my drive. It made it more sustainable and incorporated more self respect. It made me more self-driven to build the life I wanted, and less worried about what that looked like from the outside. It gave me permission to build a business that served my life rather than consumed it – a philosophy I now share through my podcast, Hustle With Aloha.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?

I function as a fractional chief marketing officer (CMO), and the services I provide are branding, marketing strategy, and the design of persuasive communications materials. For the last 18 years I’ve worked with over 140 brands. Fractional CMO services are for small businesses, typically of 1-40 employees, who need senior level marketing strategy to ensure that their marketing budget is used efficiently and effectively. They get a senior-level partner without the high overhead of hiring a W-2 employee or an agency. Sometimes they have an in-house team who I guide and support. or at smaller businesses sometimes one of the founders is taking lead on the marketing and they need help. As a one woman show, I pride myself on having a trusted and vetted network of additional providers who I can call upon to expand my services for whatever my clients might need. However I never outsource strategy or design and I end up doing most of the web development myself so that I can directly control costs and quality. My most popular package includes a brand strategy road map, logo design, and the creation of a persuasive website.

Before working with me I tell my clients – as both a promise and a warning – that all of my work will be rooted in brand strategy. This means that at the beginning of our relationship I will invest time and energy in getting to know their business. This is so that I can make recommendations with confidence knowing that what I build is in direct pursuit of the business’ strategic goals. It’s also so that I can make sure that the look and feel which I use in design and communications is an authentic representation of their brand voice.

I have good news for everyone. There is no need for you to ever hire someone to brand you. You don’t need someone to create your brand. That’s because your brand already exists. Just as the brand of every organization and company already exists. My job as a brand strategist is simply to discover that brand, define it, and put it to work. That’s why the first part of my brand discovery process I call “archeology” – because I’m digging around, learning about your company, customers, and competitors. I’m looking to unearth truths, interesting artifacts about your business and why you run it in a certain way. I collect these insights into your brand and examine them, hold them up into the light, ask what we can learn about them. That’s the archeology phase. The last phase of my brand discovery process I call “alchemy”. This is when I take those valuable brand nuggets and I work at combining them, distilling them, working them together, looking for true-lines and trends. The goal of this phase is to combine the elements of your brand to create “brand gold”. That’s why I call it alchemy. These labels help impress upon my clients, that everything that makes up their brand already exists.

Once a company has their brand strategy defined and formed, it’s a magical tool that makes all marketing easier. When a company knows who they are, what they stand for, and the space they hold in their customers’ hearts – it’s easy to speak from this place. When the voice is confident, the message is clear. It becomes easy to speak through marketing materials on behalf of the business. It’s intuitive to anticipate your customers questions and how they want to be approached. Marketing flows easily, sounds authentic, and sounds consistent. In other words, a company’s marketing feels charismatic. That’s why I’ve named my DIY branding course, Charismagic.

Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?

When I was 28, I quit my job at a design firm in LA, filled my Geo Tracker with everything I could fit, and drove North to start a business and a new life in Portland, OR. I think I had about 3 months worth of living expenses saved up. I didn’t know a soul in my new home except for a boyfriend who came with me but ended up leaving after a few months. I was renting a room in a house with a couple others (very Portlandia) and running my fledgling business from a folding table and a TV table I’d pushed together to create a desk in my bedroom. I guess you could say that was taking a big risk, but I didn’t see it as having a potential for failure at the time, so in a way it just felt like I knew in my heart that I’d figure out a way to make it work. If I didn’t have enough client work to pay the bills, I took temp gigs working at other creative firms, worked as a designer at a pressure washer manufacturer, worked at an independent film production company, and was familiar with the help wanted section of Craigslist. I mapped out all the happy hour spots near me that were so cheap they cost less than actually cooking, I went to networking events, and I volunteered in Forest Park. Eventually, I made good friends, found my professional “tribe”, and built my book of business. I still collaborate with many talented folks I met back then and keep in touch with some long-distance besties from those years. In fact, two just visited me in Florida a few weeks ago!

At the end of the day I guess I believe that taking risks, big and small, is how we grow and pursue our dreams. If you always did what was safe, what kind of life would that be? Most of the good stuff lies just outside our comfort zone.