I started It’s Giving Big Deck Energy because I had zero job prospects and so many thoughts and feelings about it. And then one day, I got the idea in my head that I could monetise them. I mean… what did have to lose?
This started out as a shot in the dark to create any semblance of a revenue stream. At the very least, it would flex my brand strategy skills and become a proof point when people Googled me before they decided whether or not to sign up for one of my workshops.
But because I have never, ever been able to be (or do) just one thing, my Substack became a place to put the thoughts that didn’t fit neatly anywhere else.
Yeah, it had marketing lessons. But also feminist rants, personal essays, pop culture commentary, strategy frameworks, emotional autopsies, and the occasional, professionally useful PowerPoint sermon disguised as a joke.
It got messy because I am messy. It was my notebook, a group chat, and tiny internet goblin cave with suspiciously good brand strategy tucked under a pile of feelings.
Over half a year later, I’ve now realised the mess has a shape. The things I keep writing about aren’t random.
They all orbit the same bigger idea:
How do women become harder to ignore without sanding themselves down into something more palatable?
That means brand strategy, storytelling, visibility, and taking up space.
It means laughing at the absurdity of trying to build a life, a career, a brand and a sense of self while the internet keeps asking us to optimise our morning routines and become “high-value” humans with matching storage containers.
So I gave IGBDE a little zhuzh.
Not a rebrand. And no, not a fucking pivot.
More like finally admitting that churning out IKEA-style, one-size-fits-all marketing and PR templates for profit isn’t what I want to do.
And in my heart of hearts, it was never the reason I got on here to begin with.
It’s Giving Big Deck Energy is my messy little marketing playbook for women who want to be remembered for the right reasons.
It’s where brand strategy meets feminism, stand-up comedy, personal essays, pop culture trivia, PR advice, founder notes and hard-won lessons on becoming impossible to ignore.
This is not a beige business newsletter. It’s not LinkedIn broetry written by Claude between Zoom calls.
It’s not where I pretend running a 10k taught me everything I know about B2B marketing (I’ve actually ran three, and the only thing they taught me is that I fucking hate running). I have, however, cried in public, built beautiful decks under questionable conditions, produced sold-out comedy shows, written pitches that landed tier-1 press, and spent an alarming amount of time thinking about why people give a shit.
This place is for women building brands, creative projects, communities, careers and lives with actual personality. Women who want to be seen clearly, taken seriously and still allowed to be strange, funny, emotional, ambitious, contradictory and alive.
The through-line is simple:
Good strategy makes people feel something.
Good stories help people understand why they should care.
Good personal brands don’t flatten you. They make you recognisable.
Admittedly, I’m still figuring my shit out and there’ll no doubt still be a few kinks to iron out, but I’m much happier with where we’re at. And because I know this space will likely keep evolving, I’m not waiting around for a polished, perfect publication to manifest before telling you that I’ve moved the furniture around in my tiny internet goblin cave.
For practical brand, marketing and PR thinking without the corporate lobotomy.
This is where I put the frameworks, audits, campaign breakdowns and “babes, here’s why your messaging isn’t landing” pieces.
Expect brand strategy explained like a human person wrote it. Audience insights. Positioning. PR. Visibility. Campaign post-mortems. Possibly the occasional love letter to Google Slides because unfortunately, I really fucking do.
This section’s for you if you want your brand to sound sharper, feel more human and stop giving pitch deck in Microsoft Outlook’s default font (Calibri, in case you’re wondering).
For conversations with clever people doing brilliant work in adjacent worlds.
This is where I yap with artists, founders, strategists, designers, comedians and creative sorcerers about their origin story, the magic they’re putting out in the world, and random shit that the BBC would never think of asking.
It’s part Q&A, part creative show-and-tell, and maybe a bit like the conversation you have with someone when you realise you’re going to be great friends.
I’m interested in taste. Process. Voice. Community. Career advice. Internet culture. Freelance red flags. Fuck ups and redemption arcs. The weird or surprising choices that make someone’s work unmistakably theirs.
This section is for you if you like smart people, extremely niche references and the casual, slightly chaotic, but real professional advice you can only get when HR can’t spy on shit.
For feminist takes, cultural critique and the politics of taking up space.
This is where I get into visibility, power, womanhood, work, misogyny, ambition, rage, shame, softness and why we are all so bloody tired.
Sometimes it’s a rant. Sometimes it’s cultural analysis. Sometimes it’s a tiny Molotov cocktail disguised as a Substack essay.
This section is for you if you have ever been told you’re too much, too loud, too angry, too emotional, too ambitious, too sensitive or too unwilling to be pleasant about nonsense.
Which is to say: whether your MO for toppling the patriarchy is writing jokes, empowering women, making a zine or building a community about it… welcome, babe.
Shoes off at the door. We’re dancing to Deceptacon.
For personal essays, emotional autopsies and the stories I convince myself are “strategy-adjacent.”
This is where I write about the life stuff: heartbreak, reinvention, healing, identity, fitting in, falling apart, getting back up and — mostly after I’ve processed things — posting through it.
It’s never neat. And not always useful in the “download this framework and improve your conversion rate by Tuesday” sense.
But sometimes the most useful thing is a story that makes someone feel less alone.
This section’s for you if you like the messy human bit underneath the marketing brain. The bit that wants clarity, but needs to be held gently by the shoulders and told: “Babes. You are not a positioning problem. You’re a person.”
For jokes and things I still cannot believe I published.
This is for the silly stuff. PowerPoints made out of spite and presented on a stage. Memes making a comeback. Pop culture dissertations peppered with strategically selected GIFs. Utterly ridiculous accounts of lived experience and the surprisingly profound realisations that followed. The “I found old caricatures of men I used to fancy and unfortunately they are evidence” energy.
Because not everything has to be a lesson.
Sometimes the brand strategy is simply to spread joy.
If you subscribe for free, you’ll get new public posts in your inbox: essays, strategy notes, campaign breakdowns, Q&As, cultural rants, personal stories and whatever else my brain decides is urgent at 11:47pm.
Free subscribers get the main IGBDE universe: the ideas, the stories, the frameworks, the jokes, the tiny emotional grenades.
Basically:
Come for the strategy. Stay to feel seen.
Paid subscribers get access to my secret stash.
It’s packed with longer long-form (I refuse to say “deep dive”) strategy breakdowns, toolkits, workshop discounts, new-thread privileges in subscriber chats, and occasional behind-the-scenes bits from my messy little marketing playbook.
The paid side is where I go deeper into the practical stuff: the templates, prompts, audits, exercises and resources I use to help people get clarity on their story, positioning, visibility and voice.
Less “premium content because it’s paywalled.”
More “here are the tools in my goblin cave, please use them wisely.”
If the free posts are our WhatsApp group, the paid side is all the piping hot tea, served to you exclusively because I hit “Reply privately.”
Nosy? Correct. Strategic? Also correct.
I don’t want IGBDE to become a content hamster wheel where I’m churning out posts I don’t like to sell solutions I don’t believe in.
I want it to become a useful, funny, generous little world for women who are building something: a brand, a body of work, a creative practice, a business, a community, a life that feels more like theirs.
I know what it feels like to have too many ideas and no clear container.
To know you have something to say, but not how to package it.
To be outstanding at the work, but weirdly bad at explaining why people should care.
To want visibility without becoming a dickhead.
To have a voice, but keep trying to make it sound more “professional,” which somehow always means less alive.
That’s the space I want IGBDE to hold.
And if that’s your vibe, then come through to the cave because you’ll be in very good company here.
That’s the zhuzh.
The goblin cave has a floor plan. The shelves are stocked and labelled, but the weirdness remains.
It’s tidier, but will always be a little bit messy. Branding’s the same — it’s impossible to articulate what you’re about if you haven’t figured out what you’re not. And that doesn’t happen without trying, testing, learning and occasionally getting it wrong.
You can subscribe for free and get the public posts. You can go paid if you want the deeper resources, secret stash and useful little treats.
Either way, I’m glad you’re here.
Invite the group chat. Let’s make it a party.
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