Equip Health

Growing a healthcare brand alongside its audience.

I joined Equip as the company was finishing a major rebrand and preparing for its next stage of growth. Over the next two and a half years, I helped expand that identity across new audiences, treatment offerings and products while building the internal creative team and systems to support them.

ROLE
Creative Director / Art Director, 2023–2025

CONTRIBUTIONS
Creative Direction, Art Direction, Brand Stewardship, Campaign Concepting, Photography Direction, Creative Systems + Team Leadership

TEAM
Sajanna Bethea + Serra Semi, Design / Kate Wilsky + Randy Smith, Copy / Mollie McDowell, Creative @ Working Studio

CHANNELS
Brand, Digital, OOH, Photography, Print, Social, Content + Experiential

A Brand Ready to Grow

Equip's new identity had been developed around its original focus on children and families. I joined during the final weeks of the rebrand, working with the internal brand team and Working Studio to bring the system across the finish line.

As Equip grew, my role became figuring out how that identity could grow with it.

GIVING THE BRAND MORE EXPRESSION

The new identity included a diverse cast of illustrated characters, but each existed in a single pose. I expanded the system with new expressions, gestures and body language, giving the creative team a more flexible library for communicating the emotional range of treatment and recovery.

Growing Up the Brand

My first major assignment was helping Equip expand treatment beyond children and adolescents to adults.

The existing identity had been built primarily around young patients and their families. Rather than create something separate, we needed to find a more mature expression of the same brand.

I led the visual direction, evolving Equip's softer pediatric language with stronger grids, straighter edges, more editorial compositions and a greater emphasis on photography.

I led the shoot alongside Working Studio, developing moodboards and shot lists, shaping casting, locations, wardrobe and props, directing on set and selecting final imagery. The resulting library gave Equip a more mature visual language while keeping the warmth and humanity of the existing brand.

Taking Equip Outside

The adult campaign also marked Equip's first move into out-of-home advertising, with placements in targeted markets including Washington, D.C. and the South.

Working with Marketing, I helped develop “My eating disorder was hiding behind…”, a campaign built around the ways eating disorders can go unnoticed in adult life, where I led the visual direction and concept execution.

Making the Unfamiliar Recognizable

ARFID Treatment

ARFID can look like extreme picky eating, making it difficult for families to recognize when something more serious is happening. As Equip prioritized ARFID treatment, we needed to help patients, families and providers recognize the experience before we could explain the care.

I developed a visual approach grounded in familiar moments around food: hesitation at the dinner table, anxiety around meals and the support of family. I co-directed the photography with Working Studio, then art directed the campaign, landing pages and educational materials across patient and provider audiences.

Once the experience felt recognizable, the system had to explain it. We paired the photography with clear information about symptoms, diagnosis and treatment, adapting the depth of the content for families, patients and referring providers.

Making the Data Clear

2024 Annual Report

Equip also needed to communicate the evidence behind its treatment model. For the annual report, I established the visual direction for presenting outcomes, research and patient data, working with the team to turn dense information into a report designed to be scanned as easily as it could be read.

Humanizing Digital Care

The Equip App

As Equip prepared to introduce its patient app, my team's role was less about announcing a new piece of technology and more about showing how it fit naturally into treatment.

While the product team owned the app experience, I provided creative feedback and led the visual approach for supporting content. We focused the photography on what the app made accessible: providers, support groups, treatment resources and care from home.

Building For Scale

When I joined Equip, the internal creative team was two people: a videographer and me. As the company and volume of work grew, I built out the creative function while continuing to lead the work.

By the end of my tenure, the team included a Creative Coordinator and Designer, supported by freelance and agency partners. I introduced a creative intake process, project management workflows, reusable templates and Figma systems that helped the team handle a much larger volume of work without rebuilding every request from scratch.

5,000+ patients welcomed into treatment during my tenure

Over two and a half years, the Equip identity expanded from a brand centered on children and families into a system supporting adults, new treatment priorities, digital products, clinical education and a growing range of channels.

During that same period, Equip welcomed more than 5,000 patients into treatment while the creative team increased completed requests by 90%.

90% increase in completed creative requests, 2023–2025

The team:
Creative Director: Winnie Hefner
Senior Content Manager: Kate Wilsky
Creative Coordinator: Lacey Manuel
Content Writer: Randy Smith
Brand Designer: Sajanna Bethea
Videographer: Andre Salhein
Freelance Designer: Serra Semi

Agency: Working Studio
Creative Director: Mollie McDowell
User Experience Director: Beamer
Photographer: Victoria Wall Harris

Marketing:
Growth Marketing Manager: Kira Rakova
Provider Marketing: Sarah Koch