Evolving Brand Narratives, the Women that Make Men Stylish, and Love Letters: the brand storytelling career of Rachel Gogel
By her own self-appellation, Rachel Gogel (she/her) is an independent creative and culture officer. A young designer and entrepreneur, Rachel’s career started off in a blast when she was promoted to Design Director at GQ Magazine in 2013.
“Throughout my career, I have been placed in situations where I’m responsible for building and shaping creative teams,” she tells me virtually over iced chai — it’s still early in her San Francisco time zone. “I was really young when someone gave me that opportunity and I had never managed a team before. [At GQ] I was in over my head, but I kind of dove in and figured it out on the go. I found myself really drawn to understanding individual needs and trying to figure out how to balance leading people and directing work at the same time.”
Rachel intuited that connecting her design team to the organization as a whole required evaluating the processes and communication channels that were in place — a focus on leading a creative team “beyond execution” as she puts it. That time in her life sparked an interest in people, the organizational culture of the space those people share, and in the culture of society-at-large — hence the term “culture officer”.
“I would say, generally, a lot of creative leaders care about culture. [Yet the] work definitely overshadows the day-to-day people stuff. So I liked [how the term] was an intentional way to put it really front and center when I launched my consulting practice, because I’m not just a creative director. I can shape work and guide a body of work, but I care just as much about the culture, the people, and how the team will operate and grow.”
For designers at the start or the middle of their careers, professional growth can be gated behind a variety of barriers that refer back to more old school ways of running a creative team. Rachel is aware of the archetypal shop filled with “heads down” designers, while art and creative directors do the hand shaking and presenting. As a culture officer, she thinks that these things can be challenged or changed. “I never want it to feel like it’s my way or the highway,” she says. “Everyone has a voice.”
Rachel admits that in the pie chart of daily activities, designing doesn’t comprise the whole pie — or at least it shouldn’t. Reading books, making time for field trips to inspiring places, or building trust with your colleagues cross-functionally through 1-on-1s are all vital parts to growth and nurturing the creative self. These things are important, she says, because growth can’t be assumed. Even the most senior people struggle with soft skills, so a good creative leader should encourage everyone to challenge and grow their whole selves. As a people manager, Rachel dedicates her time to fostering spaces that unlock human potential. She’s come to care deeply about using her voice and privilege to help create inclusive and connected communities, especially for womxn and the queer community. To these ends, Rachel helped a fully distributed team relaunch the lifestyle brand Departures and advised Airbnb on how to restructure their internal brand team, both in the last year.
Today, team leaders face complex challenges that in so many instances are without precedent. Not only must they work to goals, but they must also adapt to extremely challenging changes in the workplace, daily life, and society. Leaders will need to have both emotional and relational intelligence, be more explicit and vulnerable, and create a sense of togetherness even if not physically together.
While interviewing Rachel, I wanted to address the well-dressed elephant in the room: what’s it like for a self-identified woman to lead the creative for a magazine synonymous with dough-eyed, square-jawed men, wearing fitted white T-shirts and perfectly tailored suits?
“I wanted to work at GQ because of Fred Woodward”, she says. It makes sense: Woodward is a design legend who pushed boundaries in editorial design first at Rolling Stone then at GQ. Rachel’s admiration for Fred isn’t just a simple boardroom-Keynote talking point: she wrote about it in detail (with pictures for emphasis!) for the Society of Publication Designers.
Beyond following in the footsteps of greats, Rachel was proud to be in a design leadership position in a predominantly male industry. “I was more attracted to the design language than I was about the fact that it was a men’s publication,” she offers. In her time there, not only did she improve the quality of advertorials but she also launched several first-to-market experiences: GQ Live!, the magazine’s award-winning print-to-mobile app powered by AR technology, and MyGQ, a more personalized and enhanced iPad edition. Rachel played a critical role at the intersection of technology and design as readers’ lifestyles were becoming more mobile-first (just short of a decade ago.)
After GQ, Rachel designed for some household names — The New York Times, Facebook, and Godfrey Dadich Partners, among others — before beginning her own consultancy. Yet the theme of brand storytelling remained a constant for her. In 2014, she joined The Times’s T Brand studio, the publication’s in-house agency dedicated to crafting stories for brands and brand partners.
The year 2014, hard as it is to write, was seven years ago, and the world has undergone seismic shifts since then: an insurrection in the U.S., Covid-19, and the murder of George Floyd (and everything that resulted after) to name a few.
When asked how brand stories have changed since the mid 2010s, Rachel doesn’t immediately begin speaking about external messaging, but instead talks about how brands are attempting to appeal to their current and prospective employer base. There’s an ongoing conversation in society — specifically among white collar jobs — about hybrid and remote work, and brands are eager to show that they get it, that they’re willing to listen. But there is pressure for them to do more than just listening. “Before Covid-19, I did a few talks that were about the evolution of brands and how brands were starting to identify the fact that the bullshit meter for consumers had changed, and you had to kind of show up more authentically if you wanted to survive.”
Brands — business, companies, institutions — are learning that they are being evaluated at all levels. There is no part of a business’s operation beyond scrutiny. And one part of that that has particularly captured people’s attention is how a company treats its own.
“However you show up culturally for your internal community is now transpiring externally,” Rachel adds.
Just before meeting with her, Rachel pinged me that she may be hard to reach in late mid-autumn— she was getting married to her partner, Susannah. After a hefty round of congratulations on my part, I asked Rachel to share tips for the budding (and budded) romantics at Queer Design Club.
“We write each other a lot of love letters. I know this sounds cheesy, but we live together and we sometimes will just leave little cards around the house or mail them to one another. And so I have this giant stack of them, and so does she. I think we’ve collectively penned 140 of them in the almost six years we’ve been together.”
In addition to love letters, Rachel also adds that spontaneous date nights in any form are necessary. And most of all: “Time is precious [so] express how you feel. Generally, people don’t do that enough.”
She concludes: “I’m just very conscious of the time we have on this planet.”
Follow Rachel on Instagram at @rgogel.
Published as part of Queer Design Club’s Stories collection.
