Community Highlights: Meet Kelly O’connell of Kind & Funny Brand Shop

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kelly O’connell

Hi Kelly, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
In 2020, while working at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Kelly had the idea to make “compliment ribbons” that would bring a little bit of joy during a dark time for the world. To do this, she started her own business, Kind & Funny.

That was just the entrepreneurial spark she needed to leave the world of employment and start working for herself, and soon she had transformed the retail experiment into a full-scale branding and design shop.

As Kelly used her design and marketing talents to help small businesses and nonprofits tell a compelling story with a cohesive visual identity, her husband Jed watched her be happy. She was working with such a wide variety of cool people, she was doing exceptionally creative work, and she was finding new balance in her life.

After a year of watching from the sidelines, he was ready to add his talents to the Kind & Funny team, and left his role as a senior marketing director to join the team as Kelly’s sidekick.

Today, Kelly & Jed get to work together using their complimentary strengths and experience to make things that help cool people and businesses express themselves in ways that resonate with their core audience.

You can really get a feel for the story in this instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/C6rcC9sv85P

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It has been such a fun journey to start and grow Kind & Funny, and all of the wins and losses and challenges have been valuable parts of the journey.

Kelly was fortunate to find a great business coach right off the bat in Pia Silva of No BS Agencies (www.nobsagencies.com), and Pia’s invaluable advice removed a lot of obstacles right away.

There are many benefits and challenges to living and working together as partners, and we have learned so much about how to do that well (We get a lot of advice from other couples who work together).

The best part is that our clients are awesome, and our individual talents complement each other in ways that make the work fun. Also, work always has some complications, but we can always find comfort in a few truths:

– We have had to work with people in the past that we either didn’t like, or who weren’t good at their jobs, or both.
– We like each other, and we are both good at our jobs.
– Any challenge we encounter at work can teach us something about our lives together.

With that in mind, we’ve been able to find joy in the journey, bumps and all.

These two blogs give a lot of background and color to this question:

https://www.kindandfunny.com/blog/5-things-i-like-about-working-with-kelly
https://www.kindandfunny.com/blog/5-things-i-like-about-working-with-kelly-part-2

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Kind & Funny Brand Shop?
We are a wife and husband duo with a lot of marketing and branding experience, and we love using that experience to help small business owners & entrepreneurs who aspire to live the life of their dreams NOW. (Just like us.)

Kelly specializes in hugely impactful, highly creative design that conveys emotion and personality, creating brand personalities that people can connect with. She is empathetic and intuitive and fluent in color, textures, and vibes.

Jed is a specialist in asking questions, facilitating discussion, and making connections in order to foster cohesive strategies, compelling copywriting, and smart decision making.

We love working with people who are passionate, interesting experts in their own way and using our own expertise to help them tell their own unique story.

Unlike a lot of agencies, we specialize in doing projects quickly and with total focus instead of having long, ongoing engagements. This blog talks a lot about our process: https://www.kindandfunny.com/blog/5-things-i-like-about-the-kind-and-funny-fit-call

How do you define success?
Working with each other to make cool things for cool people and being able to pay our bills is success for us because it allows us to live a meaningful, full life. We have freedom to make art, to try new ideas, to learn new things like skateboarding and drawing, and to work from different places with different people who constantly inspire us with their dreams, and humble us by allowing us to help them get there. As Miley says, “It’s not about what’s waiting on the other side, it’s the climb.”

Pricing:

• https://www.kindandfunny.com/brand-shop
• Soul Search – $1,000 – All of our projects start with a deep-dive interview, after which we deliver a strategy and optional projects. This investment is applied to the cost of a project.
• Great Questions with Jed – $150 – info at www.kindandfunny.com/jed

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kindandfunny.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bekindandfunny/