Terracotta Design Build
TERRACOTTA
CASE STUDY | MARKETING MANAGER · CONTRACT·ATLANTA, GA·JUL – DEC 2024
Terracotta Design Build shapes restaurants, retail spaces, and hotels — bespoke, materials-forward interiors built for photographs and remembered by touch. For six months, I ran their marketing: rebuilding how the firm sounded and looked across a print lookbook, the inbox, the Amazon shelf, and the events calendar.
The Ask
The work spoke for itself — well-crafted rooms, tastefully shot. The marketing around it needed work. The brand needed to be unified and expand their interior & hospitality offerings. I came in to build the connective tissue.
The Approach
A positioning and visual system flexible enough to hold a 40-page lookbook, an Instagram grid, and a holiday gift guide — and still read as one studio.
LISTEN
Competitive analysis and a hard look at market positioning — who else was chasing the same hospitality and retail clients, and where Terracotta's point of view actually stood apart.
DEFINE
A refreshed brand voice and visual style, built to travel — from a printed page, to a styled product shot, to a three-line email subject.
CONNECT
A marketing plan linking every surface: print collateral informed social, social fed the inbox, and the inbox pointed straight at the Amazon shelf.
The Work
Four surfaces, one voice — print, social and email, retail curation, and the in-person moments that brought the brand into a room.
Terracotta needed one asset that could walk into a room and close a client on its own. I assisted the photography styling, wrote and edited the copy, and designed Eat / Shop / Stay — a lookbook organized around the firm's three practice areas. It became the studio's primary leave-behind for new business.
Turning the Feed Into a Storefront
AMAZON STOREFRONT CURATION · LIFESTYLE CONTENT
Terracotta runs a curated Amazon storefront alongside its design work — the finishes, gifts, and objects that show up in their projects, made shoppable. I built seasonal gift guides and lifestyle content that gave people a reason to click straight from a holiday email into the shop.
Design that captivates
POSITIONING COPY · EDITORIAL LAYOUT
The lookbook's opening spread carried the studio's positioning statement across restaurant, retail, and hotel work — paired with a curated grid of detail shots pulled from real projects, set to read like an editorial feature rather than a sales sheet.
one feed, one voice
CONTENT STRATEGY · EMAIL MARKETING
I planned and produced the firm's Instagram content and email marketing — moving the feed from a scattered project dump to a curated, on-brand grid, and building lifestyle email series like "H Is for Holiday Hosting" that gave subscribers a reason to open, not just a reason to buy.
Bringing the Brand Into the Room
EVENT COLLATERAL · INVITATION DESIGN
Beyond the screen, I designed invitations and collateral for Terracotta's in-person moments — a holiday open house and the Secret Garden Soirée at Bulloch Hall — extending the refreshed visual language to seasonal sub-marks and printed pieces.
06 / On-Set Styling
Styling the Shot, Not Just the Room
Prop & vignette styling · On-set art direction
Before the photographer ever set up, I walked each finished space and built it for the camera — filling shelves with baskets and boots, hanging coats and totes just so on the pegs, staging a mantel or console down to the candlesticks. The gap between a finished room and one that photographs like a lookbook cover is usually a dozen small decisions made on set, and that styling pass fell to me on every shoot.
The Outcome
By December, Terracotta had what it didn't have in July: a single visual and verbal identity that held together across a 40-page lookbook, a product feed, and a party invitation.
The lookbook gave the sales team a real leave-behind. The content calendar gave the studio a reason to post on purpose instead of sporadically. And the Amazon storefront turned a curated shelf of finishes into an actual retail surface for the brand — one more place a follower could become a client.
I took a design-build studio with beautiful work and an ambitious, and gave it one story to tell — in print, on the shelf, and in the inbox.