Cureton Consulting

The short version. When Roar was brand new, Trey did what you do when you start a business: he called his friends to see whose next adventure he could be useful on. Meghan Cureton was one of those friends. The two had worked together at The Mount Vernon School, and Meghan had taken the leap into entrepreneurship just ahead of Trey, launching an education consultancy built around teaching and learning, strategic planning, and curriculum design. In exchange for a Nintendo Switch, Roar built her brand from the ground up: strategy, name, and identity.

Where they started. Meghan was starting from zero. She had deep credibility in education. She was the founding director of the Innovation Diploma at Mount Vernon, an internal design studio where high school students earn an alternative diploma by working with real for-profit and nonprofit companies to build market-ready prototypes, many of which went from idea to full implementation. What she did not have yet was a brand that made a brand-new practice feel like an established one. The challenge was to give a first-day consultancy the look and feel of an agency that had been around for years, without hiding what made Meghan different: her particular perspective on how a consultant can actually support a school.

The move. We ran Meghan through Roar’s brand frame process. It starts with a brand personality assessment, how the people you serve think, talk, and feel about you, plus the X factor you bring that no one else does. From there we mapped her ideal client profile and her competitors, then used all of it to shape the visual identity, the logo and the color palette included. Service design was just as essential: naming the categories of work she offered and writing them so a prospective school could see itself in them.

The name was the easy part. Cureton Consulting, straight from Meghan’s last name. The meaning lived in the mark. Meghan’s heart for education is empowering students to do more than they, or their parents and teachers, believe they can. And having helped found the Innovation Diploma together, Trey and Meghan shared a conviction that connection and collaboration are the only way to do big, hard things. So the C, a play on Cureton, carries lines of interconnection inside it, a quiet picture of that belief.

What we made:

• A full brand strategy through Roar’s brand frame process: brand personality, ideal client profile, and competitor mapping
• The name, Cureton Consulting
• A visual identity, including a custom C mark with interconnection built into it, a logo system, and a color palette
• Service design: the categories of work, named and written so schools could see themselves in them

What happened. Cureton Consulting launched with a brand that punched above its age, and Meghan has kept building. Like most brands do somewhere in the five to seven year window after starting up, Cureton has since moved through another identity transition. Meghan continues to work with independent schools and associations, helping them navigate change through curricular strategy and put the systems in place to make that change stick. You can see where the work has gone at meghancureton.com.