Why the Most Powerful Brands Don't Need to Shout with Lauren L'Heureux

So welcome to Dawn of a New Era, the Billionaire Brain podcast. And today I have a fellow peer, Lauren, with me, who is founder and chief creative officer at LaRue Creative Studios, where she helps visionary women build story-led luxury brands centered on resonance, intention, and legacy rather than noise. So, Lauren, give us an intro about who you are and what we need to know. Okay.

Well, I'm super happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me. And yeah, I own a luxury creative agency, so we specialize in creating brands that are story-led. So not just designing brands, not just talking about them, but what a brand looks like and exists like holistically.

So everything from the actual visuals to the copy and the messaging through the positioning, all the way down to helping our clients discover what their ideal price point is so that they're making more money and working with less clients. So it's all about how we position them in the market and help them, you know, grow the brand and business as a unique look that is holistic in all ways. So that's the rundown on the agency. And I've been doing this for four years now, and I love it.

It is so my bread and butter. It's so what I'm meant to do, and it's creative in all the fun ways that really light me up. So I love it. Love it.

So LaRue was born from a deeply personal journey of healing and turning pain into your purpose. And many founders I talk to have got similar journeys. Myself, I started my first business at 21, and that was basically after having six deaths in six months, and it gave me a really different perspective on life, but also on business. So...

What happened in your life that made building this brand feel necessary rather than simply just building this business opportunity? What was the key moment? Well, there was definitely a big shift when I was a freshman in college. My brother passed away in a motorcycle accident, and over the next 14 months of my life, I went through three different traumas, starting with my brother, and then about six months later, I was sexually assaulted in my apartment in New York City.

I went through a whole trial, which was very demeaning and degrading and very unpleasant. And then about eight months after that, my dad tried to commit suicide after losing my brother. And, you know, the collectiveness of all of those traumas at such a young age, I just was very unequipped to process anything like that. So going to college in New York City offered me, you know, kind of the best distraction possible.

I threw myself into absolutely everything I possibly could, from Fashion Week internships to interning at Penguin Random House. I was on a track to go into publishing. I got my degree in English lit, and I just did everything I possibly could, including some very bad decisions, focusing on boys and dating and drinking and making some not so great choices that led me just down a more destructive path. And after I graduated, I kind of hit what I would call a breaking point.

I ended up moving back home to Florida to have a knee surgery. I was a competitive dancer when I was younger. My body had just been physically through a lot of trauma in dance, and this was something that was very necessary for me to just kind of function better in life. And so I took that as my excuse to kind of take a break from reality.

And the way I look back at it is I think the universe was very much working in my favor because during that recovery time is when COVID hit the rest of the world. And that was a pause for everyone, not just for me. And I reached a point in my life where I was so deep in my grief and in my unhealed emotions that I no longer wanted to live. And I expressed that to my parents, and they sat down with me.

We had a really great supportive conversation. We decided, you know, the whole world is on pause right now. No one knows what's going to happen. So I need to take a break and I just need to heal.

So I threw myself into healing in every way possible. I completely transformed my life. I went back to therapy. I started alternative therapy, so I started EFT tapping.

I worked with a life coach, and I just started addressing every part of my grief, my trauma, my anger, everything that was just sitting very deep within me. And in that time, I wanted to start documenting what I call my healing journey looked like. And so I started a blog, and it was really mostly for me, just kind of a way to look back at this time in my life and see the progress that I made. And unbeknownst to me at the time, that was me creating a personal brand.

So this actually all started with a personal brand. And in that time, I was doing all of my own creatives. During COVID, I taught myself how to write code. I built my own website, and I just threw myself into things that felt really fun for me.

And that was always things that were very creative. I've always naturally been a very creative person. Even with dance when I was younger, it was—I was choreographing my own, you know, solo routines. And so I went through the healing journey, and I met another kind of shift in my life where I decided I wanted to move back up to New York.

And to do that, my mom, you know, very generously offered to financially support me for a couple of months while I figured out what I wanted to do. And I moved back up to the city, and I sat down with one of my best friends one day, and she's like, You need to start making money, and you need to do it this way because you're so good at it, and people are asking me to, you know, do their creatives. I was offering to do it for free, and I was like, All right, I just need to make money at this point, so let me just start doing this while I figure it out. And I launched the Creative Studio in May of '22 with just doing branding and web.

And over the four years now, it has developed into a full-size agency, everything from actual brand production to event production. And, you know, it's become this big colossal thing that I'm so proud of and love and continue to grow. So that's kind of the whole—that's the whole story. Yeah, we've met through a mutual client of mine and at events, etc.

, that we've been to, you know. And I think what's really interesting with this story is there's so many listeners who will have small snippets of parallel. And every founder has a different story. It doesn't always come from adversity, but I love the fact that every single founder I talk to gets hands-on, like they learn code.

I used to be a programmer, and that helped me so much when I started my agency because that's when the internet began. I mean, one of your strongest beliefs is that luxury brands don't need to shout to be noticed, and I love this whole concept. So, in a world where we're obsessed with visibility and viral content and constant posting, how do you build quiet power while still generating serious revenue? I think it goes back to one of the words that you used earlier that's in our kind of company bio and my personal bio is that resonance.

You know, creating a brand that speaks for itself means touching every possible touchpoint that you have, right, and making sure that each one correlates to the next. It's all about that cohesion in the positioning. And I think that that's something that a lot of brands miss, or they only focus on one thing. They focus on getting that virality.

They focus on showing up in one specific place, but then the way they're showing up there isn't how they're always showing up in other ways. So the way that we approach that quiet luxury is really through working with our clients on every single touchpoint that they have and making sure that each one complements and speaks to the next. So what I mean is the way your branding looks needs to match the way you talk about your brand, the way you show up on your website, all the way down to how you write your email signature, how you show up on LinkedIn and that little bio that you get on Instagram. Like every single moment where your brand shows up, where someone, a potential client, can see it, needs to match.

And I think that a lot of brands miss that. Or if they want to sit in a luxury market, they don't know how to position it in that way. And so instead, they are positioning it for things like virality and Gen Z because that's what they think they need. And then they're not getting the ideal client that they want.

So I think it's about that resonance of making sure that the brand is consistent across every, what we call them as touchpoints, and making sure that when someone shows up to any moment where your brand exists, they understand what it is, what it means. And then the next time they find it, that's just reiterated, that's just complemented, and then so on and so forth to the point where they are ready to work with the brand, the service, the product, whatever it is. Yeah, and I think it's really interesting because I talk about this a lot. A lot of people have got social media fatigue, and for me, it took me years to go onto Instagram because LinkedIn was like my primary channel.

I always wanted to master a channel before I moved to the next, and I think that served me really well because, if I'm honest, if social media did go away tomorrow, my businesses would still continue because I decided to go for the brand and the relationships first and get that stability and foundation so that we're almost unshakable in an online environment. I mean, I think with a lot of things that are coming to play now, AI, brand is even more important. So you've recently spoken about choosing fewer projects and greater depth and longer client engagements, and I am very passionate about this. I only work with my clients for a minimum of a year.

What did the numbers and the workload or the client experience reveal that made you rethink how

Larue should scale. Yeah, it was really last year, in the beginning of the year, where I decided, you know, I was working with like 15 clients at once on a more rapid scope, meaning our kind of, our previous primary touchpoint with clients was brand, website, copy, and SEO, and those were kind of the things that most people wanted to focus on. So we were all project-based, no retainers, and I was working with 15 active clients at once. I was still on my own at this point, so I had no team supporting me.

And I just remember feeling such fatigue in the way I was showing up to my work and in the way that I was showing up to building client work. And I remember thinking, wow, I really don't want to be doing this right now. And I was showing up a lot for the same type of clients. So I built, at the beginning of building Larue, my client book was a lot of interior design, architecture.

It was just kind of a world that I was kind of ushered into via a partnership that I have, and that's amazing because it allowed me to build my client roster. But it became so mundane and so repetitive that I wasn't feeling that passion anymore. And so I took a step back. I took a little while to think about what I wanted.

And there was a funny moment in my personal life that a best girlfriend of mine, her younger sister asked me to do all the day-of coordination of her wedding. And I was like, I have no idea what you're asking me to do. I've never done this. Like, I don't know.

And she's like, but I know you can do it. Like, I just know. And so I showed up to her wedding. We had, it was the most amazing day.

It went perfectly. At the end of the day, this guy offered me a job at the venue. And then my partner, my now fiancé, asked me, you know, how can you integrate this into your services? And I'm thinking to myself, you know, I'm in a rut right now.

I really loved doing that, but I don't want to work on the consumer side. I don't want to work in weddings. And so I slowly started to think about ways that I could evolve the business, knowing that from a financial and development standpoint, it's important to me that I get to a more consistent place, meaning I need to move from project to retainer. And then how do I do that?

Thinking, how can I work with clients in a longer way? Really touch all of those touchpoints that we talked about, and making sure that we're really involved in the brand and not just someone they've hired for one single service. And then thinking on the event side, how can I evolve my agency into bringing this in? And so over the course of about six months, I just really sat back and mapped out, like, what I wanted LaRue to look like and how I ideally wanted to work with clients.

And it morphed into this idea of us no longer working on projects, but working with clients in a retainer scope where we essentially serve as their fractional creative team. So they bring us on for a year, two years. We completely redevelop, reposition all of their own creatives, and then kind of just hand deliver that to them. So help them implement to get to a point of consistency where they no longer need us, or we train a team member and now they have one person on the team that can take it over.

And that's where I really wanted to take it. And that's very much an active evolution that's happening. We do still work on project scopes on occasion for certain clients, but I think it's something that was really important to me in developing that, knowing I wanted to work so much more intricately in a brand than just showing up on web or just showing up for branding, because these are brands that I myself just become more passionate about, right? When the client comes on and they tell me their vision and they talk about their business the way I talk about my business, it makes me want to get more involved.

And so that's kind of the evolution that LaRue has gone on in becoming more of an intricate wheel or cog in someone else's brand. And I love this, that I know from talking to lots of founders that most of their businesses started with a very heavy focus towards obviously building the foundations, getting consistent cash flow. So luxury branding can sometimes become this beautiful aesthetic in someone's mind without the commercial substance. And I see it in both worlds where founders don't put brand first because they don't understand the value themselves, but also where I've seen brands created that don't align to the commercial scalability of the business.

So what separates a brand that merely looks expensive from one that can command a premium price and attract exceptional clients and endure for the next decade or however long? Yeah, that's where we get so intricate in the actual positioning. So everything down to writing your service copy, to the way you approach a sales call, the way you talk about the business in all forms. And I think that's what a lot of brands really miss, is it's really easy to create an aesthetic brand now.

Pinterest is a godsend in that way. And looking at other creatives, Canva, like, it's easy for people to create something that looks beautiful. But if they can't describe why, if they can't describe what the service does and how whoever the ideal consumer is is using it to transform their life, they are only going to appear luxury, which is easy to do, but that experience is not going to be luxury. So something that we also do with our clients is build the consumer experience that they have.

So from the moment you sign a client, that onboarding to offboarding experience that they have needs to feel luxury. So the way I always describe it is clients come to us, they have a service that costs, let's say 10K, and they want to sell it for 50K without adding 100 more deliverables to it and, you know, 100 more hours to the project. And so the way we look at that is taking a full step back of the brand, asking, auditing the brand, asking them, okay, from the moment a client discovers you, what does it look like? If they discover you on Instagram through referral, if they find your website, like the first moment of interaction to the very end of their client experience needs to be curated.

And that's what creates this understanding, this want for someone to say, yes, this is why I want to spend 50K on this. It is worth it. And it's not just about this, you know, surface-level experience. It's about— Communication, it's about how you interact with them on a daily basis.

It's about support, especially if you're in a service-based business. Different, more different conversation for product, but we primarily work with service-based. So it's really just about making sure that at the end of the day, a true luxury brand has a service model that delivers that luxury experience. And I think that that's what a lot of brands miss, and they only hit the luxury aesthetic or the look of it.

So true. And I think that a lot of businesses actually are very front-end in their promotion, the messaging, and all of that, and then the client becomes less seen and less heard and less understood as the actual experience of delivery goes on. I've always felt that even from day one, like 25 years ago, that that was the central hub of our business because as soon as a client comes on board, that whole confidence, that whole communication has to stay consistent. And I truly believe that that is why my businesses have grown and scaled so quickly, because clients stay with us two, three, sometimes five years or longer, and again with team.

So I think brand is not just the external culture, but also the internal culture that you're breeding. What's your view on where founders can really level up on either side in 2026? Well, first, let me go back to what you mentioned about the consistency of communication, because that's something that's very important. I have noticed that there are clients that we've worked with even where it's all about they chase the sale, right?

It's all about the onboarding, it's all about getting the client, signing the revenue, and then all of a sudden this person has paid thousands of dollars for a service and they feel unsupported. Something that I want to touch on before I answer your question is that our entire— Our entire revenue model, our entire client roster is built through referrals. And that is such an easy way to build a business if you've got a luxury client experience, because people are selling for you. You've got all these clients that are singing your praises, talking about you.

The moment someone says, Oh, I really need to redo my branding, oh, go to Lauren, go to Lauren. Like, that's exactly who you need to be with, because we have that experience. If you are only chasing the sale and then not nurturing a client, really even more so once they are an actual client, they're not going to refer you. And that can become such a revenue generator if done correctly.

So I just want to touch on that. Very, very important. But to answer your question, I think the way showing up as a founder is changing is very rapid. In the age of AI, in the way women are growing their presence in raising capital and building bigger businesses and showing up as stronger entrepreneurs, I think the way it looks is really changing.

I think something that's very important this year, especially with social media and AI, is really discovering your message, who you are, who your business is, and why you stand out uniquely, because there are

Swaths of people that are turning into entrepreneurs, young girls, young women that are, you know, leading the Gen Z route on entrepreneurship, and they are changing the way that we have to show up with how AI can write messaging, how AI can create imagery, how it can write websites for us. Like, you could show up on Claude and code a whole, you know, landing sales page right now, and it takes all of an hour. I think the most important thing is understanding who you are in your business and who your business is in your market. If you don't know how to answer those questions, you're not going to grow.

Yeah, and I totally believe in referrals, and I think every single business that I've had, five businesses on, have all had referrals as a key part. And I think it's sustainability. I probably won't be around for 25 years without it. But referrals are a key part of the marketing process.

And even today, a client of mine who is based in the UK was in Paris, went to a networking event, referred someone to me. That person then went to Paris, an event later, a second event, and then referred through. Hadn't even worked with me, but just because someone had referred them, it was good enough in their knowledge and understanding that, oh, well, if they've worked with Dawn and they've referred her, I'm going to pass it on. And I think that's the power of blind referrals, because I do get quite a lot of them, where someone who is clear on my message will go, I've not worked with Dawn directly, but here's her details.

I've heard she's really good. And reputation does follow. So on the branding side, especially with AI, one of the biggest flaws I see with founders right now is creating these AI graphics. You can see that they're AI.

Everyone recognizes them, and I wouldn't say people have a particularly positive view towards them. But people are using channels really incorrectly. So, for instance, on Instagram, you know, posting graphics but not using text to get SEO. So people are disappearing from the explore pages, TikTok or Instagram, LinkedIn, and not even understanding or categorizing what they're talking about.

How can you bridge the gap between creating really solid, like, branding and maintaining consistency with in-channel and using it correctly? Yeah, I think that, I think what most people find when they're building any sort of presence on socials or however they're working their messaging is people ourselves, when we're in it every day, when we're writing the messaging, whether we're using Chat to help or we're writing it ourselves or a team member is writing it, we ourselves are in it every day. So we see the messaging and we're like, wow, this is repetitive. I said the same thing two weeks ago.

I said the same thing yesterday. This is getting boring. You know, it's this need to see something new because we are in an age of consumerism where something new is available at our fingertips at all times. But that is actually the key.

People need to remain repetitive. You need to consistently be pushing your message out because, like you said, if someone's on an explore page on Instagram and sees your post, they're discovering you. Most people are discovering you for the first time. So if you on a whim decide, you know what, I'm going to say something completely different today, and then someone clicks it and goes to your Instagram and then sees all this other messaging and they're like, who is this person?

I have no idea what they're doing. That is not the reputation you want to build. That is not brand consistency. So the repetitiveness is the key.

You have to show up consistently, not in timing, because I'm not someone who specializes in social media, so do whatever you want there. But you have to show up in your messaging consistently. The moment you solidify your messaging, that is your Bible. That is your brand Bible.

That is what needs to remain true until the next evolution of your brand five, ten years from now. So I think that's what people might be missing, is you see yourself working in it every day, so you see yourself getting bored. But if the message remains true, that's what needs to be put out there, not this new fun whimsy that you want to try. And with luxury brands, I cannot stress this enough, you are not hopping on trends.

You're not doing things that are the trend right now, sound trends or audio trends or dance trends or whatever they are. Like, you're showing up consistently with your brand. And yeah, that might feel a little boring, but the moment someone new discovers you and they see all that consistency and they see that positioning, that's what attracts them to want to work with you. Yeah, and I really see this.

And the true power for me is when somebody sends back my message through somebody else. So they'll say, Oh, I've been recommended to you, Dawn, because I know that you help female founders scale to 100K. And I've always gone with the same messaging again and again and again, and it does feel repetitive. But the proof is in the pudding.

If people are clear about the messaging, then it helps build the bridge, obviously, from, you know, an unaware audience to actually working with you. I think one of the things that is so important is that so many people cannot actually articulate what they do in one sentence. And I think branding really does play a big part there. If you were to give one piece of advice of how to create this elevator pitch, this one sentence, what would it be for really getting that message to hit hard for your brand?

Well, I think this applies for any brand. If you're not someone who wants to sit in a luxury market, no matter where you want to sit, I think the most important thing is sitting down, being able to answer who is your ideal client or customer, purchaser, whoever it is, why are they buying from you and not a competitor, and what does your product or service look like? And the moment you can answer those questions, it's just kind of that one, two, three fold of that sentence. So you meet someone, you introduce yourself, okay, here's your pitch.

This is what I do. This is who I serve. And this is why they pick us. This is why clients work with us.

I think it's a mold of understanding not just your service, but your ideal client. And something that I'm a huge, huge advocate for is when you're showing up in these rooms, meeting new people, discovering someone for the first time, and they don't know who you are, you get to be the best version of yourself. So even if Your elevator pitch isn't specifically true right now. That positioning yourself for where you want to be, I think, is also very important.

Obviously, we're not lying, but we're saying, you know, okay, if I just started my business and I say we help, you know, clients scale from 10 to 20K months, but I haven't done that yet, but I'm working with clients on doing that, that's the pitch that I want to sell, right? Is that this is where I want to be positioned six months from now, a year from now. So I think adding in sprinkles of where you're moving towards, not just where you're at, is also very important. And just saying that this is who we serve moving forward, right?

And so I think those are the things that you need to be able to understand in order to give a really good elevator pitch, a good sales pitch, a good introduction of who you are, who the business is. Yeah, I always get founders to understand what their edge is and also their wow statements that they can drop into rooms, because those are the things that really set apart the vanilla from the person that they actually remember. So we're coming to the end of the interview, and I think there's been so many nuggets, but this is always my favorite part because we can position a founder in all of their glory. But on this podcast, we talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

So my signature question to you, Lauren, is: what has been your most embarrassing moment in business? So is it the decision, the launch, or the behind-the-scenes disaster that makes you cringe now, but has actually taught you something really valuable? Well, I'm someone who's very, very bad with names and faces. Not good at all.

It's a very untalented part of myself. And it's funny because I know this about myself so well, and yet when someone introduces themselves to me, I choose to allow the name to go in one and out the other ear. And so I was at a networking event last year. It was a pretty important networking event.

It's one that I've been to consistently, and it was a dinner party. And I showed up and I saw this woman who I thought I was 100% confident I thought I knew who she was. I went up, I said hello. It's so nice to see you again, used the name of the person that I thought she was, and I started talking about business.

And this very, very kind woman let me go on for about two minutes or so before she finally said to me, You know, I don't think I'm who you think I am. And I'm just like, No, but you are. And she's like, No, my name's X, Y, Z. And I was like, Oh, that's really terrible.

I'm very sorry. And then I later found out that she was actually someone quite important at the dinner, and I was completely mortified because I'm so bad with names. So from that day forward, I have actively tried to be better with names and faces because it was a very mortifying experience to address someone who is not who I think they are. We've all done it.

I mean, I had one that I've still never actually gone and told them that I'm not. It was just so comical that, you know, someone came up to me at an event. It was an event we were both at, and they just started talking to me about my realtor journey and went on and on and on. And even to this day, and I've met them three times since— Oh my gosh.

—they always come up and say, and this is the best bit, that they love seeing online how my realtor journey...

Progressing. I don't know whether I should put them out of their misery. Maybe I should wait for the fourth time, but now it's just so funny. And because it's gone on for three times, and the fourth time is going to come.

But they're actually saying that they're seeing and following my journey, which I think is even more mortifying. So I'm kind of choosing to be kind and not tell them, but then I'm also kind of enjoying it too. So I love these stories. So if people want to come and find out what you're doing, find out more about the agency, where is the best place for them to connect and to find you?

Definitely on the website. You can see a good portfolio of our work, our services, just get a better understanding of the business. So it's L-A-R-U-E CreativeStudio.com.

We also have our Instagram, same handle, showing up there. And if you're ever interested in working with us, just shooting us an email, filling out our inquiry form, always a great way to get in touch and just start the conversation. Excellent. And is there any book or podcast that you've been reading recently that you can recommend for our founder friends?

Yes, absolutely. So something that I'm a huge advocate for in business is within our referral network of clients, within our client experience, something that is super, super important to us, where pretty much all of our marketing dollars go is client gifting, and understanding the psychology of client gifting and why it's so important to welcome your clients to the experience that's about to unfold, or thank clients who have sent you other clients. And so the journey that this started on was me reading the book called Giftology. It's incredible.

It's all about the psychology of gifting, why it's so important, and not just like, hey, here's a Starbucks gift card, but an actual personalized gift that keeps your name top of mind with clients. This book is actually something I gift my clients as well on occasion, and so it's just something that has really helped me build a very psychologically driven revenue point of my business. I love that. I love that.

So thank you so much for sharing all of your gems. And again, if you guys, you can go and check out the website and follow Lauren's journey. So thank you so much for spending time with us today on Dawn of a New Era. And guys, if you've listened to this and you love the podcast, please remember to download it, tune in each week, and obviously rate and review the podcast.

So thank you, Lauren. Thank you so much for having me. Take care.