✨ Where I’ve Been
For the past month, I’ve been in full Pie Queen mode — helping run a local drag dessert brand that showed up everywhere during Denver’s Pride season. Think: pop-ups, parades, performance deliveries, press coverage, rainbow pies, and enough last-minute duct-tape fixes to warrant a backstage award.
What started as a pandemic survival plan became something much bigger. The Pie Queen is community. It’s celebration. It’s branding in its boldest, loudest, campiest form — and it works.
🧁 The Business Behind the Glam
The Pie Queen is led by Chocolatina Q Dessert, a live-singing drag queen and award-winning pastry chef — and also someone I’ve known and loved for over 15 years. They make (genuinely) Michelin-level pies using locally grown Colorado ingredients. Then we put those pies in boxes, throw on some sequins, and deliver joy.
The glam is real. But so is the work.
We managed 15+ events in 3 weeks. Refined our operations and menu for scale. Built real-time feedback loops on product delivery and brand experience. And ran marketing the same way I coach my clients to do it:
With intention
With strategy
With voice and consistency
This wasn’t content for content’s sake. This was brand visibility, product-market fit, and community-led demand gen.
📈 5 Things Pride Reinforced About Brand Strategy
1. Visibility is earned, not granted. It’s built through repetition, alignment, and showing up even when you're exhausted. Every post, every pie, every performance was a data point. It’s not magic — it’s execution.
2. Brand experience is the product. If the delivery is off, the memory sours. Every touchpoint — packaging, emails, photos, voiceovers — shapes your brand, whether you plan for it or not.
3. You don’t need a funnel. You need a feeling. Funnels don’t sell pies. Joy does. Make people feel something first — structure can follow.
4. Real-time feedback matters more than dashboards. You want insight? Watch someone eat your product in front of you. That’s better data than any CRM can offer.
5. The work behind the brand is the brand. We taped signs to tents. Carried pies in 90° heat. Dealt with last-minute fire codes, surprise costs, and outfit malfunctions. The fact that people saw joy? That’s branding.
💥 Why This Matters for Founders + Marketers
Whether you’re building a fintech platform, a SaaS tool, or a drag dessert brand — the fundamentals are the same.
Your audience doesn’t just want content. They want consistency. They want connection. And they want a reason to care.
Most founders treat visibility like a growth hack. It’s not. It’s a discipline. And like any discipline, it gets easier (and stronger) the more often you do the work.
🔁 What Happens Now
JDay Creative is back in full swing. The pies have cooled. The lipstick’s still intact. And I’ve got a notebook full of content ideas, positioning frameworks, and spicy Clarity Hits ready for Q3.
If you’ve been waiting — thank you for your patience. If you’re new — welcome to the glitter-fueled side of strategy.
👇 Let’s Connect!
Want to build a brand that makes people feel something? Need help making your marketing land with more clarity and less chaos? Let’s talk.
→ Follow @JDay Creative on LinkedIn → Or just hit reply and say hi. → Subscribe if you like what you read (I promise to be more consistent now that I’ve washed the glitter out of my hair).