I've been dying to share my Brand Architect with you! Creative, authentic, and passionate, Melanie Anne Bitner is a fearless advocate for Entrepreneurs, Thought Leaders and Executives. With a mission to empower her clients, both personally and professionally, she founded Brand-HER and is now a Creative Partner at Agent Quest—giving new and savvy Realtors the CLARITY they need to create businesses in alignment with their personal definition of success!

Melanie has worked in agencies, been a freelance designer, a writer and an artist and has close to two decades worth of experience in communication design, branding and strategy. Her clients have included cities, museums, government and many corporations and small businesses. She is also a long-term student of world-renown Emily Carr University of Art & Design with a passion for creating in many mediums.

We dug in to the importance of defining the essence of your BRAND and the WHY! I think you'll agree that Melanie is particularly gifted in this realm and I'm so privileged to be able to share her expertise with you!

For more information or to work with Melanie and I on discovering YOUR Brand Essence, please take a look at our Brand Quest offerings http://agentquest.ca/aq-brand-quest/ and feel free to reach out with any questions! OR if you're an entrepreneur and want to explore more ideas with Melanie, visit: http://brand-her.com/about/

Announcer: You're listening to Conversations That Matter with your host, Teri Conrad.

Teri: Hi, everybody, this is Teri Conrad, and I am having a conversation that matters with a very dear friend of mine, Melanie Anne Bitner, who also is my designer, but we’re calling her more than that, actually. Now we call her a brand architect, and there’s a very specific reason for that. Melanie is an incredibly savvy businesswoman. She comes from an agency background. She understands marketing and branding on a very granular level and how all of those things tied together to build a successful business and I, of course, conned her into helping me with Agent Quest and – it actually all started with Conversations That Matter.

Melanie: It did.

Teri: We got together and I talked a little bit about what I wanted to build with this project, and it just sort of ballooned from there. Welcome, Melanie.

Melanie: Thank you so much for having me today, Teri. This is amazing. I'm super excited to work with you, and to have you as my friend, and to share what we know about branding, and what we know about marketing, and to share that with your audience.

Teri: Of course, I just continue to learn, and learn, and learn from you as we go through the process of working with our own clients. Let’s start back at the beginning. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and sort of how we came to meet and how all this sort of happened.

Melanie: Okay, so going way back, I started about twenty years ago. I had a total passion for art and design, and I thought that I wanted to be a painter at one point, in fact. Then a really amazing teacher of mine suggested that I might look at other options to expand my creative outlet and also make money and have a living – not starve. He introduced me to commercial design and I was hooked ever since. 

Coming right out of high school, I went right from the ground up and learned in a print shop and then became a designer, and then became an art director and then I got to work in some great agencies in Vancouver where we got to work with big agency types of people.  We had clients such as the Port of Vancouver, government, museums and things like that.

Then, I decided to become a mother. That’s a whole other career.