Marketing support for ambitious scaling brands | Board Advisor | Epic Kitchen dancer

Creative Marketer of the Year 2025 - Global Women in Marketing 
I work with brands in the heat of it - when growth stalls, relevance slips, and pressure from investors and teams makes everything feel messy, political, and slightly existential. 
Priorities clash. Messaging blurs. Marketing turns beige. 
The spark that built the brand gets buried under process, politics, PowerPoints… and, dare I say, consultants who somehow turn a simple idea into a 97-slide framework that no one really understands.

I help brands step back, get clear on the commercial opportunity, understand what consumers really want/need/desire and find the actual white space.  
Then I help build something distinctive: energy, edge, ideas. And I embed it across the whole experience so it actually sticks.

Big ideas that shift the market. Tiny details that make the difference.

Brands today aren’t built on one big ta-da campaign, but on layers of moments that grab attention, build connection, and quietly convince people, again and again, “Oh… they get me.”

Sometimes i work as a project partner (with an amazing team behind me). Sometimes fractional- if you want long term support. Sometimes advisory- if you want a helicopter view. 
If you’re saying, “We’ve got a problem, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…” or “Why is no one buying us anymore?” or even “we’ve lost our spark”, We should talk. 
Brands I've worked with: ManiLife, Cheeky Panda, Cawston Press, Chupa Chups, The Coconut Collab, Valerie, Oddbox, Goodrays, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Frucor Suntory and more.


And because I am obsessed with people and how they people, I am also the host of podcast ‘why aren’t we talking about this?’ that explores the messy, raw, contradictory parts of being human. Available on Spotify, Apple and everywhere else.

This is a two-posts-in-one-day, kind of day. Because this is massive.

We are on the front page of the LIBERTY website. Twice.
 
Because LIBERTY- THE purveyor of beauty, health and wellness, has launched Valerie as part of a new curation of wellness products into store.
 
LIBERTY has always been front and centre on the vision board since the very, very beginning. And for them to believe in the mission and the product knowing they only back things that are genuinely efficacious, things that actually work, is a deeply humbling moment (hate the word humble, but I genuinely can't think of a better word to describe the mix of gratitude, pride and happiness).

The feedback we’re getting from consumers. The feedback from buyers. Everything we’re hearing, is showing us that we’re making a difference and being part of the tide of change. Removing shame, removing embarrassment,  and pulling Perimenopuase kicking and screaming into the spotlight. 
 
I’m quietly (and loudly) grateful to be part of it. And best moment of the day Wizz Selvey calling me outside the store squealing- yes, we play is so cool here.

Carly Osman Holme

The Big Ideas and Tiny Details of Marketing | NED | Epic Kitchen dancer

I had seven driving instructors, failed my test three times and have had several parking incidents, so it is safe to say that driving is not my strength. 

So it surprised even myself when I impulsively signed up to drive 1,200km in a TukTuk across India. 

Yep, makes total sense….

Next month I pack my bags and alongside 48 other female founders we are hitting the road driving from Chennai to Goa.

Whilst I’m sure I will have (some) fun, we are doing it for a really important reason, to raise £150,000 and help women and girls in Chennai, providing:
1. Safe, water-proof classrooms for 1,000 children every year, helping girls and students with SEND stay in school and learn properly.

2. Practical skills and financial independence for young women who are often first-generation literates with huge potential but limited opportunities.

3. Life-saving postpartum care for new mothers in Chennai, including combatting anaemia, plus nutrition, medical monitoring, and vital health support.

Please, please donate, even if it’s just the equivalent of a glass of wine- every penny counts: https://lnkd.in/e8Sr5Un7 

Huge thanks to Emma Sayle and Frankie James for organising this wild trip- please don’t let me die. And all the women doing it with me, I’m not a great navigator either- sorry, but I will bring the tunes.

I get my energy and inspiration from travel and adventure. Off grid, ideally where I can’t speak the language and moving at a slow pace so I can soak everything up. 

This Christmas, me and my little family went to Sri Lanka. It’s going to take me a while to let the magic of the country fully digest, but it lit something in me- a craving for more colour, more vibrancy and flavour, more depth, more community. More going with the rhythm of life. Not forcing. Not pushing. Just being.

Over the last few years, I’ve become increasingly sensitive to the performativeness of hustle culture- the way we’ve collectively decided that worth looks like speed. Work at breakneck pace. Juggle endlessly. Move on before you’ve even finished the thing. Always scanning, always in motion, never still, never not busy. I am very good at working like this, as someone who gets shit done, I find it easy to get swept up by it.

While we were there, I found myself walking slowly through paddy fields with a farmer, Prandeep.  Prandeep is probably the happiest person I have ever met. As he showed me all the produce he grows and I tried to not freak out about the number of mosquotos around us, he spoke about his philosophy of life: to be content in the moment. Not in the past or in the future, those things don't actually exist. That no one has the power to make you happy or on the flip side, suffer. He talked about integrity, about intention, about the power of community. Nothing flashy. Nothing optimised. Just deeply rooted.

I am highly ambitious. I always have been and I always will be. But I think for a long time my ambitions were slightly off-kilter, shaped by what I thought I should want, rather than what actually sustains me and gives me energy.

My real ambitions are simpler, and somehow dare I say braver: to live more slowly without shrinking myself, to build work that feels spacious rather than extractive, work that changes and shapes the lives of people for the better. Choose depth over pace, presence over performance. To measure success by how grounded I feel in my body, my family, my community, and the difference that I am actually making, not by how busy I look from the outside.

This is the energy that I am wanting to bring into 2026.

One of my favourite things we do at Valerie is our Wild Women newsletter and it’s for entirely selfish reasons.

Every two weeks, I sit down (usually on the sofa, sometimes in bed) and write the opening editor’s letter. It’s essentially a ramble. Or a rant. Whatever has been percolating, niggling, or quietly building up. And because it’s anonymous (well… until now), I haven’t held back.

I’ve written about friendships and relationships. About f**king things up, both spectacularly and quietly. About weird symptoms, spirals, moments of clarity, moments of total confusion. It’s raw, unpolished, a bit ragey and (confession) deeply cathartic. I like to think of it as my therapeutic outlet. 

What started as a bit of an experiment has become one of our most important brand markers. It signals that we’re not here for surface-level, transactional stuff. We care about depth. About women feeling genuinely seen and heard. We want to normalise the uncomfortable conversations and we do that by showing we’re right in the thick of it too.

And it’s working. The newsletter has an average 75% open rate, and every edition women tell us it feels like we’ve crawled inside their brains and written exactly what they couldn’t quite articulate themselves.

Community has been a marketing buzzword for the past two or three years, but for most brands it translates into hollow exchanges and performative engagement. For Valerie, community is our lifeblood. It’s the reason we get up and do the work. It’s the reason I bare my soul- probably with too much TMI, every two weeks.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can sign up to read it on the website.

One week in and i know I meant to be guns blazing... but nope.

Let's try again next week.

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