Today we’d like to introduce you to Dauss Miller.
Hi Dauss, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I’ve been building a life around creativity for nearly three decades.
I started my career as a photographer in the late 1990s, shooting epic weddings and eventually creating commercial fashion, lifestyle, and advertising work for brands including Target, Adobe, Google, Pepsi, and others. Photography gave me an incredible career, but more importantly, it taught me how much perception matters. The right image can change the way someone sees a person, a company, an idea, and even themselves.
Over the years, my work naturally expanded beyond photography. Clients needed clarity around their positioning, messaging, identity, content, visibility, and ultimately how all of those pieces worked together. I became increasingly fascinated with the space between who someone already was and whether the world could actually see it.
That evolution eventually led me to build Planet Ü Creative Agency here in Austin.
Planet Ü brings together brand strategy, identity, editorial photography and film, digital experiences, content, PR, authority building, and marketing. We work primarily with founders, experts, executives, and companies who have something meaningful to bring into the world and need their brand and visibility to fully represent the caliber of what they’re building.
The philosophy underneath everything we do is simple: Where your future self becomes visible.
I’m still a photographer. I’m still an artist. I’m also a strategist, creative director, entrepreneur, husband, father, and someone who remains deeply curious about people and what makes them extraordinary.
At this stage of my career, I’m especially interested in helping brilliant people become more visible, understood, remembered, and trusted. There are extraordinary people doing meaningful work everywhere. I want to help amplify that magic and the positive ripples it creates.
Austin has become the place where this next chapter is unfolding, both for my family and for Planet Ü, and I feel like we’re only beginning to see what it can become.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
HA! …smooth would definitely NOT be the word I’d use.
I’ve been an entrepreneur and creative for nearly three decades, and there have been seasons where everything felt like it was working, followed by seasons that forced me to rebuild almost from the ground up.
I’ve experienced seasons of financial uncertainty, major changes in business, the evolution of an industry, difficult personal seasons, and the challenge of supporting a large family while building something that doesn’t come with a guaranteed paycheck. I’ve had moments where, from the outside, my career looked incredibly successful while behind the scenes I was figuring out how to keep lights on and bellies full… and everything else moving.
One of the biggest challenges has been allowing myself to evolve. I spent many years being known primarily as a photographer. Photography is still deeply woven into who I am, but I eventually realized that my ability to see people extended far beyond making photographs. I could see their positioning, their story, their potential, the gaps in how they were presenting themselves, and often a version of their future that they hadn’t fully articulated yet.
Building Planet Ü has required me to trust that larger vision.
There have also been seasons that tested me personally. Marriage, fatherhood, raising a family, entrepreneurship, financial pressure, and trying to remain creative through all of it have taught me more about leadership than any business book or mastermind ever could.
I’ve learned that resilience isn’t always some dramatic comeback. Sometimes it’s getting up the next morning and creating again. Making the call. Loving your family. Serving the client in front of you. Finding the next opportunity. Continuing to believe in what you can build even when the evidence hasn’t caught up yet.
At almost 50, I actually feel more creatively ambitious than I did at 25. I have decades of experience behind me, but I still have an enormous amount of curiosity about what’s possible.
Some of the hardest chapters of my life have ultimately given me greater empathy, perspective, and clarity about the kind of work I want to do and the kind of person I want to be while doing it.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I’m an artist first. Photography has been my primary creative language for nearly three decades, particularly editorial, fashion, lifestyle, and portraiture. I’ve had the opportunity to create work for brands including Target, Adobe, Google, Pepsi, and many others, but the part of the work I’ve always been most fascinated by is the person in front of the camera.
I have an ability to see people. Their energy. Their contradictions. Their confidence. The parts of themselves they haven’t fully expressed yet. My job is to translate that into something visible.
That philosophy has grown far beyond photography and is now at the heart of Planet Ü Creative Agency, which I visioned and co founded with my wife, Tamara.
Today my work sits at the intersection of art, brand strategy, identity, editorial photography and film, storytelling, PR, digital experiences, and marketing. We help founders, experts, executives, and companies build brands capable of carrying the weight of where they’re going.
One of the things that sets our work apart is how deeply personal the creative process is. We spend time understanding the human being behind the business: their history, perspective, ambition, expertise, personality, and vision. From there, we build an entire visual and strategic world around them.
That thinking led to the development of the Icon Method™, our flagship process for transforming a founder’s story, positioning, visual identity, content, and authority into a cohesive ecosystem. It combines strategy with deeply personal editorial photography and film, strategic interviews, media visibility, and the infrastructure needed to continue building authority over time.
I’m proud of the commercial work and brands I’ve photographed throughout my career, but I’m probably most proud when someone sees what we’ve created and recognizes themselves in it, sometimes more clearly than they could before.
That’s the thread connecting everything I’ve done for almost 30 years.
I make peoples essence visible.
Planet Ü is simply the biggest expression of that idea I’ve built so far.
What matters most to you?
People matter most to me.
My wife. My children. My family and the people I love. The people I create with. The people whose lives intersect with mine, sometimes for years and sometimes for an afternoon.
I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about what we leave behind. I’ll likely be 50 by the time this is published, I think about it even more in this stage of life. I don’t believe legacy is simply what you build or how successful you become. It’s the effect your existence had on other people.
My job on this earth, as I understand it, is to create and to bring attention and amplification to magic that is already making positive ripples and elevating life.
That shows up in my work, but it’s bigger than work.
I’m fascinated by people. I love finding the thing inside someone that lights them up, the idea they can’t stop thinking about, the gift they may have underestimated, and helping give it a larger stage. Sometimes I do that with a camera. Sometimes through strategy, storytelling, a conversation, music, or simply encouraging someone at the exact moment they need it.
Creativity matters enormously to me because creativity changes what people believe is possible. Love matters because it gives all of that creation somewhere meaningful to land. Family matters because they are the people I actually share this life with.
I want my children to grow up knowing that their uniqueness is something to explore deeply. I want them to see a father who kept creating, kept loving, kept becoming, stayed curious, and kept trying to leave things a little more beautiful than he found them.
And when this whole thing is over, I hope there are people who can point to something I created, something I said, a photograph I made, an opportunity I opened, or simply a moment we shared and say, “My life expanded a little because that human was here.”
That would mean everything to me.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.daussmiller.com/home
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/daussmiller
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daussmiller
