Amber Health
The research became a company. I built the brand it goes to market as.
The touring-industry mental-health research I’d co-authored at THRIV had proven the problem. Then two of the people behind it — including THRIV’s founder — set out to build the service that answered it, and came to me, through Shipyard, with a logo-and-website request and a founder’s name over the door: “BorerNewman.” The first thing I gave them was a different answer. In a guarded, high-trust industry, a brand named after two people has a ceiling. We rebuilt it as Amber Health — a market-facing identity made to scale past the founders who started it. It’s still the name the company runs under today.
The problem
A touring mental-health service lives or dies on trust. Artists and crews are guarded, the stakes are high, and the founders’ existing identity — named after themselves, on a low-quality site — read as two people, not an institution an industry could lean on. They needed to launch before touring season, and to look established the day they did.
In a field where you’re asking artists to trust you with their most private struggles, looking like a startup isn’t a cosmetic problem — it’s a credibility one.
The work
The brief was a logo and a website. The real problem was the name. “BorerNewman” tied the brand’s credibility to two individuals in a market that needed to trust an institution. I repositioned it around the audience instead of the founders — a market-facing brand, Amber Health, with room to grow.
Touring season set the deadline, so we ran it in two phases. Phase one was a fast, credible launch: the identity system, presentation templates, and a one-page point-of-contact site ready for the March 2023 season. Phase two extended it into a fuller brand and web presence. The point of phase one was to look established on day one.
The pitch had real evidence under it — the THRIV study I co-authored, the first major data on mental health in the touring workforce — so the brand could stand on proof, not just empathy. Those materials went out to some of the biggest tours in the world.
Where it landed
Amber Health launched on time and went to market pitching major touring clients. More telling: years later, the company still operates under the name and identity I built, and has grown into the industry’s full-service mental-health provider.
The brand outlasted its launch — which is the only real test of a brand.
Scope
- Client
- Amber Health
- Studio
- Shipyard
- Role
- Brand strategist & designer; web design; go-to-market
- Year
- 2023
- Engagement
- Brand repositioning & naming · identity system · point-of-contact site · pitch materials
- Disciplines
- Brand strategy & naming · Identity design · Web design · Go-to-market collateral
- Foundation
- Built on THRIV research (named study co-author)