You've seen the claims.
This is the work.
Four engagements, four different problems — an award-winning B2B repositioning, a full-stack D2C rebuild, a first-ever co-marketing program, an industrial brand evolution. The same operating system underneath every one: foundation first, then performance.
FoHSE
We repositioned the most powerful lights in cannabis as the most trusted — then built the brand, the demand engine, and the industry moment to prove it.
FoHSE cracked the code on light customization and built its name on raw output — the most powerful LED fixtures in commercial cannabis. But in a maturing category, power had become a spec-sheet race anyone could enter. Cultivators weren't just buying wattage anymore; they were betting their facilities on a partner.
"Most powerful" was a claim. "Most trusted" needed to take the lead — across positioning, creative, content, demand generation, and the industry's biggest stage. That's the engagement: embed as fractional CMO and move the brand from product superiority to category authority.
What the Brand Needed
- Positioning beyond the wattage race — a reason to believe bigger than the spec sheet
- A creative system that could carry one idea across digital, print, field, and trade
- Agency stewardship to optimize lead gen and attention into qualified pipeline
- Owned audience growth — not just impressions
- An industry moment that made the repositioning undeniable
Embedded as fractional CMO. Rebuilt the brand position first, then ran every channel — creative, content, demand gen, campaign, and experiential — through it.
Brand Repositioning
Moved the brand from "most powerful" to "most trusted lights in cannabis" — new messaging hierarchy carried through every touchpoint.
Creative System
26+ creative pieces shipped — a campaign-grade asset library spanning digital, print, field, and trade, all running one idea.
Integrated Campaign
"More Light. Less Waste. Bigger Returns." — deployed across site, digital, building-scale OOH, and mobile billboards running the Vegas Strip.
Demand Generation
Rebuilt the lead path from form fill to qualified conversation — lifting conversion 41% and feeding pipeline growth.
Content & Owned Audience
Launched the LinkedIn newsletter and grew it to 1,700 subscribers in 90 days — an owned channel into the exact buyers who matter.
Experiential · MJBizCon 2025
Full show takeover — booth, building banner, branded merch system, happy hour, street-level media. Peer-voted Best Booth of the show.
Building-scale presence. The campaign at full size — owning the patio experience where attendees break off to discuss and network.
Best Booth — Peer-Voted Highest Honor
Mobile Media Running the Strip
The Lounge in Action — Brand Experience on the Floor
Merch System — Brand Worn Off the Floor
Repositioning is only real when the market responds. It responded three ways: pipeline grew, conversion jumped, and the industry's own exhibitors named FoHSE the best presence at its biggest show.
Peer-Voted
Deal Flow
Qualified Lead
Traffic
In 90 Days
Shipped
Adaptaphoria
We took a brand with a great product and no foundation — and built everything it needed to grow, without stopping the business to do it.
Adaptaphoria had one of the best formulas in the functional beverage category. The taste was there. The creative energy was high. What was missing was everyone else — no one with a marketing background on the team, which explained everything downstream.
"Great product" had become the entire strategy — easy to believe, hard to build from, impossible to scale. Without a foundation, every channel was performing below its potential and the brand couldn't run paid ads at all.
What We Inherited
- No marketing leadership on the team
- A site leading with Delta-9 messaging — unflagged, unmanaged, unrunnable on Meta
- Fragmented visual identity that didn't hold up across channels
- No email strategy, no list, no Klaviyo setup
- No Meta-ready creative, no retail or field assets
D9 led the homepage. Category-confused positioning, no compliance layer, no path to paid social.
Function and flavor lead. New voice, new art direction, Meta-clean PDPs — built to convert and built to scale.
Embedded as fractional CMO. Assessed what existed, sequenced the rebuild, and executed across every customer-facing system — simultaneously, in market, in four months.
Brand Architecture
Positioning, messaging hierarchy, and identity system — built first, so nothing downstream had to be rebuilt twice.
Site Redesign & Rebuild
New brand voice, new art direction, new copy architecture — out of category confusion, into a clear identity.
Meta-Ready Product Pages
PDPs rebuilt with clean language — no THC references — engineered to pass ad review. Paid social unlocked.
Email Program · Klaviyo
Strategy, flows, segmentation, and creative built from zero. List grown from 1 subscriber to 1,500+.
Digital Campaign
Creative production, A/B testing, and iteration across paid and organic — influencer marketing integrated as earned amplification.
Retail & Field Strategy
On-location and retail strategy built from the ground up — shelf presence and field sales enablement assets included.
The metrics aren't the story — they're evidence the foundation works. A brand that couldn't run ads, had no list, and was doing single-digit weekly orders is now a functioning digital business.
Same Traffic
Built From Zero
No Flags
Stack Rebuild
Tracks Executed
Strategy Built
CCELL × Airo
CCELL is the technology inside the products people buy — invisible at the point of sale. We built the co-marketing program that made the ingredient impossible to miss where cannabis is actually sold.
CCELL created the first ceramic heating core — the technology that enabled cannabis vape to grow into a $7.5 billion category. A global rebrand had just planted the flag: CCELL at the core of the cannabis movement. But the core was still invisible on the menu where the purchase actually happens.
This was CCELL's first co-marketing campaign — ever. Brought in by global brand leadership to execute it, we owned both mandates: the performance and the presentation. The job: optimize it, structure IO #2 with negotiated added-value media and a smarter state map — and prove the new brand position in sell-through, not impressions.
What the Campaign Needed
- Visibility for an ingredient brand at the moment of purchase decision
- A first-ever co-marketing model — structured so CCELL and Airo both win, and built to be repeatable
- State-by-state media built on regulatory and market reality — not a national spray
- Placements tied to dispensary penetration, so ads ran where product was on shelves
- Attribution that proved revenue, not reach
Executed CCELL's first co-marketing campaign with ownership of both the numbers and the look — and rebuilt the second flight around market knowledge Leafly couldn't supply.
Co-Marketing Strategy
Designed CCELL's first co-marketing program — the CCELL × Airo partnership on Leafly, with ingredient-brand visibility built into every placement.
Media Optimization · IO #1 → IO #2
Took over the first insertion order mid-flight, optimized performance, then negotiated IO #2 with expanded content and added-value media.
State-Level Market Strategy
Weighted spend by regional knowledge — emerging vs. established markets — across MD, NJ, WA, OH, NY, MI, IL, CA, and CO.
Dispensary-Penetration Targeting
Tied menu ad placements to where Airo product was actually stocked — guaranteeing visibility to shoppers who could buy that day.
Sponsored Content
Two Leafly articles personally edited so the technology story reads as the CCELL story, on-message with the core-of-the-movement position.
Measurement & Wrap Strategy
GMV-level attribution, full wrap reporting, and forward recommendations — SOV expansion in MD, NJ, and IL where the data proved headroom.
Article 01 · AiroPod. "How AiroPods deliver a top-shelf experience every time" — presented by CCELL on Leafly.
Article 02 · AiroX. "How cutting-edge tech sets the all-in-one AiroX experience apart" — the technology story is the CCELL story.
Amplification. Leafly's 87.5K-follower channels pushing the partnership — 750K+ added impressions.
Sixty days. Nearly 3x return on every media dollar — with 695 shoppers buying Airo/CCELL for the first time. Performance strong enough that the wrap conversation was about expansion, not renewal.
60-Day Flight
Product Is Stocked
Incl. Amplification
+14.5% vs Prior 60 Days
Shoppers Converted
16,500+ Clicks · $6.26 CPM
WedgeRock
A decade of engineering credibility, growing on reputation alone — and a story that sold none of it. We rebuilt the positioning, the brand, and the site so WedgeRock finally sells like it engineers.
WedgeRock builds precision actuation systems for environments where a wrong specification isn't a setback — it's a shutdown. Subsea, oil and gas, offshore, pipeline infrastructure. The company grew on engineering excellence and word-of-mouth — despite its marketing, not because of it.
The problem wasn't the website. It was positioning. The company had no articulated answer to the only question that matters in technical sales: Why you? Engineers specifying equipment don't buy the way consumers do — they buy confidence. WedgeRock could win that argument on every count. The story just wasn't being told.
What We Inherited
- A founder-built site — nearly a decade without a strategic overhaul
- Copy that read like a spec sheet written by committee — mission statements, no buyer logic
- No lead capture, no form fills, no inbound pipeline — relationship sales only
- Real competitive differentiation living entirely in the engineering team's heads
- No positioning audit against the actual players in the segment
A digital catalog with a phone number. Stock photography, claims without proof, no brand narrative, no path to inbound.
"When standard solutions don't fit, we engineer what does." Engineer-direct voice, in-field credibility, proof up front, lead capture built in.
Diagnosis first: separate the symptom from the root cause. Then audit, reposition, and rebuild every customer-facing surface.
Internal + External Audit
Pulled the differentiation out of the engineering team's heads, and mapped the competitive barbell to find the unclaimed middle.
Positioning
"The catalog ends where our engineering begins." Defines the right buyer, stakes the lane no competitor owned, and invites the exact inbound that converts.
Brand Evolution
Identity and art direction moved from generic stock imagery to in-field industrial credibility — a brand that looks like the environments it survives.
Voice & Messaging Architecture
Engineer-direct copy built on specificity and proof — torque, depth, certifications — including the "Five Reasons Engineers Specify WedgeRock" framework.
Website Redesign & Build
Full rebuild: product-line architecture, industries served, field-proof band, and an application-first structure organized the way engineers actually evaluate.
Inbound Infrastructure
Lead capture where none existed — anchored by the invitation that defines the brand: "Have a non-standard application? Good. That's our specialty."
Phase 1 shipped in two months, start to finish: positioning, brand evolution, and the full site rebuild. The brand now answers "why you" and captures the inbound it was never built to receive. Phase 2 is in scoping.
In a Decade
Built to Win the Spec
Built In
Positioning to Live Site
Small Team + Technology
Delivered Independent
Real product. Real team.
Something isn't clicking.
That's exactly where every one of these engagements started. I come in, assess what's there, establish the foundation, and execute against it — without stopping the business to do it.
michael@rsnfld.com · rsnfld.com · 415.533.9076