We recently had the chance to connect with Lori Kendall and have shared our conversation below.
Lori, a huge thanks to you for investing the time to share your wisdom with those who are seeking it. We think it’s so important for us to share stories with our neighbors, friends and community because knowledge multiples when we share with each other. Let’s jump in: What is a normal day like for you right now?
As a digital nomad traveling the world, my days are split between work and travel. I usually wake up around 6 a.m., grab a work out, make breakfast, and have a coffee while I get ready for the day. Depending on my timezone, I will either immediately get to work on projects and speaking with my clients or I’ll head out for a walk around whatever city I’m in or head down to the beach. My hours are flexible depending on my time zone, but I try to keep similar hours to my US based clients which can mean regular working hours in a more central time zone or evening hours when I’m in Africa or Europe. Depending on the number of clients and tasks I need to complete for my business I work between 8-10 hours and try to set up in a beautiful location to enjoy where I’m located while I work. Evenings are for exploring, writing, reading, and trying new dishes.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
My name is Lori Kendall and I’m the owner and founder of Brand + Design + Creative, a creative marketing agency that specializes in brand design, web design, and brand design for our clients. What makes my brand unique is the way I blend strategy with style to create design that’s not just beautiful, but meaningful. I specialize in helping passionate, knowledgeable business owners who struggle to explain what they do. I ask the right questions, draw out their clarity, and translate it into a brand and website that finally feels like “them” – clear, cohesive, and confidence-boosting.
Every brand I create is built from the ground up with no templates or shortcuts, so the end result is thoughtful, strategic, and something my clients can truly grow into. I bring a calm, collaborative energy to every project, so while the process is structured, it also feels fun and creatively expansive. My clients often tell me they feel seen, supported, and surprised (in the best way) by how well their final brand captures who they are.
Amazing, so let’s take a moment to go back in time. Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
When I was young I was wildly authentic. I dove into my own sense of style and the things I loved with abandon and with zero sense of how other people might perceive it. I never understood why my big feelings or big love and appreciation for the things that took my attention were embarrassing or different. To me it made total sense that if I loved a particular hat that I would wear it everyday. That if I wanted to start wearing my older brothers clothes I would simply make up my mind to do so and stop wearing dresses and start wearing sneakers, oversize shirts, and long shorts. And when I got tired of that phase, it made total sense that I would switch to another way of dressing and become obsessed with a new band, movie, or book and way of being and interacting with the world. I never thought it was weird to jump head first into whatever interest or way of expressing myself that called to me and I never shied away from being disliked if it meant I couldn’t speak my mind or be who I was. It wasn’t until later in life that being liked took center stage and I started changing pieces of myself to better fit into the world around me.
What did suffering teach you that success never could?
Suffering allows us to discover our own resilience. Throughout my life, things happened that felt incredibly unfair and impossibly difficult. For many years, I let the things that felt unfair and difficult take me deeper into my own sadness and avoidance. In the face of the impossible I would retreat back inside myself and give up in as many ways as I could. I felt like I couldn’t look life directly in the eyes or cope with the things happening around me. Finding the strength to face things head on, picking myself up and doing the impossibly hard things I needed to do to get my life back in order, and discovering that I could get knocked down and pick myself up over and over again was an incredibly difficult, but very necessary life lesson. To be able to sit with pain and despair, to be able to keep moving even while you’re scared and crying, to be able to start over, over and over again – that’s powerful and something you can only learn when you absolutely have to.
So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. Where are smart people getting it totally wrong today?
I think that in a world filled with so much information, we’re getting lost in the gap between theory and practice. It has become easier to become an “expert’ in something simply by reading and finding out as much information about it as possible, but avoiding the difficulty of putting that information into practice. There are many concepts that exist well in theory, but are messier in practice and I think a lot of very intelligent people are staying in the safety and surety of the theory of something and avoiding the reality of what that looks like being put into practice. You can read a thousand books and memorize facts about how to draw properly, but until you put pencil to paper you’ll never truly develop the skill or be able to fully utilize the theory. Doing is just as important, if not more so, than learning.
Okay, so before we go, let’s tackle one more area. If you knew you had 10 years left, what would you stop doing immediately?
I would hope that I would stop expecting so much. Stop expecting so much of myself and stop expecting anything out of life. I think to truly live and experience life is to simply accept it on its own terms and to fully embrace the good and the bad. The beauty and the limitations. I struggle with the very human act of living in the future – constantly putting new goal posts in front of myself with the thought that maybe some new goal or achievement will unlock a future life where things feel easy and right. The future keeps coming and it keeps feeling less easy and right and more humanly complex and I think that’s the reality of every future – whether you reach your goals or not.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://branddesigncreate.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/branddesigncreate
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorikendall/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/branddesigncreate
Image Credits
@cruellsphoto for my headshot, all other images are mock up designs
