Art and science, working as one

I'm Stefanie Bernal — a brand and growth leader with 10+ years across B2B SaaS and AI, working where brand, growth, and business strategy meet. I turn brand into measurable growth, and build the systems and teams that keep it compounding.

Stefanie Bernal, brand and growth leader
Stefanie BernalBrand & Growth Leader — Creative & AI

A designer who runs the whole system

I'm a designer by training — a BFA in Graphic Design — who learned to run the whole system. In six years at one company I was promoted three times, from Senior Designer to Branding & Creative Director, growing from making the work to leading brand, web, and growth beside the executive team.

I rebranded AccountingTax.com into Corvee — the systems behind its first Inc. 5000 and $18M in revenue — then carried the brand through the move to Instead. Along the way I owned the growth engine, took organic from near-zero to the largest channel, pioneered GEO before most brands optimized for AI, and built production systems where agents design, build, and write alongside the team.

Perspective

How I think about brand and growth — and the stack I bring to it.

Brand is a growth channel

Identity isn't decoration above the funnel. Done right, it's one of the most durable ways to grow — and it's measurable like any other channel.

If it matters, it's measured

Craft and analytics aren't opposites. Every brand decision ties to an outcome I can show — that's what makes creative defensible in the room.

AI belongs inside the work

Not a novelty beside the process, but agents embedded in it — generating, drafting, freeing people to think. I build the systems and teach the teams.

Great creative needs great operations

The eye gets the credit; the rhythm makes it possible. Naming, archives, review loops — the quiet systems that let designers move fast.

Capabilities

  • Brand strategy & rebranding
  • Creative & art direction
  • Design systems
  • Messaging & voice
  • Web experience & optimization
  • GEO & SEO
  • Growth & demand
  • Lifecycle & email
  • Generative AI & production
  • Marketing analytics
  • Attribution & reporting
  • Experimentation & testing
  • Team leadership
  • People development
  • Executive partnership
  • Cross-functional delivery
  • Adobe Creative Suite
  • Figma
  • Webflow
  • WordPress
  • HTML/CSS
  • Salesforce
  • Pardot
  • Marketing Cloud
  • Iterable
  • Mailchimp
  • Litmus
  • Google Analytics 4
  • Search Console
  • Tableau
  • Claude
  • Claude Code
  • ChatGPT
  • Gemini
  • Perplexity
  • monday.com
  • Asana
  • Slack
  • Loom

Lead through partnership, not hands-off

The clearest picture of how I lead is the work itself — built with creative people, not around them. Take a look at this case study on partnership and collaboration.

Read the case study →
Stefanie Bernal×Bella Pixel Studio

Questions I hear

Straight answers to what people ask when brand, growth, and AI live in one role — the questions that come up in interviews, intros, and first calls.

A brand and growth leader owns both how a company looks and how it grows — and connects the two. In practice that means running brand strategy, web, and demand generation as one system: positioning and identity that make a company recognizable, and the SEO, GEO, lifecycle, and analytics that turn recognition into pipeline. I've done this across B2B SaaS and AI for 10+ years, most recently building the brand and growth engines behind Corvee and Instead.

Yes. Brand is often treated as unmeasurable, but every brand decision can be tied to an outcome — organic traffic, conversion rate, influenced pipeline, or channel mix. At Corvee I took organic search from near-zero to the company's largest channel and built the design systems behind its first Inc. 5000 ranking and $18M in revenue. The point isn't to reduce brand to a number; it's to make creative defensible by showing what it moves.

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is optimizing content so AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity cite you, the way SEO optimizes for Google. It matters because a growing share of buyers now ask an AI model instead of searching. GEO rewards clear, answer-first, well-structured content with real specifics and named entities. I began optimizing for AI search before most brands treated it as a channel, and I build pages to be quoted, not just ranked.

It means AI agents are embedded in the daily production process, not bolted on as a novelty. I build systems with Claude, Figma, and Webflow where agents pull from the product, generate and adapt visuals, draft and iterate on copy, and route data — freeing the team to think and decide. Then I train people to run those systems, which is how a small team ships far more brand and web work than its size suggests.

I work best at the intersection of brand, growth, and product — as a creative and growth leader partnering directly with marketing and executive teams. I've worked alongside SVPs of Marketing and CEOs, and I've built and mentored teams, training editors and coordinators into specialists. I'm drawn to B2B SaaS and AI companies where brand needs to be both beautiful and accountable to growth.

Let's build something that grows

Open to brand and growth leadership roles. The fastest way to reach me is email or LinkedIn.