“Brand, to me, is the soul of a business”

Faire’s Head of Brand Studio Ximena Keirouz on why small businesses matter, what’s next for Faire’s brand, and more

Head of Brand Studio Ximena Keirouz has always believed in a multifaceted, multidisciplinary approach to creative work — and has the career path to prove it. She’s always followed her desire for knowledge and experience, which has led her from fashion to advertising and now to tech, where she leads Faire’s Brand Studio, which is responsible for crafting and communicating Faire’s brand to the world.

We sat down with Ximena to talk about why small businesses matter, her visions for the future of Faire’s brand, and how she approaches leadership on her team.

What do you do at Faire?

I’m the Head of Brand Studio at Faire. I’ve been here for a few months, and my day-to-day work can vary because the projects I’m working on are both big and small. For example, we’re a small and mighty team, so I’m trying to figure out how we organize projects to determine scope and resources. I’m also asking, how do we create processes that allow us to work closer together with our internal partners? So there’s a lot of that. There’s also a lot of planning and a lot of visioning work that we do for the team.

On the other end, I also still enjoy playing a little bit of the IC (individual contributor) role. I love partnering with designers to think about headlines and concepts, give design direction, and more.

What drew you to Faire?

So many things. The Faire product is beautiful. We’re addressing a real problem for our customers. The customer base is inspiring. I also really like this idea of helping small businesses thrive, which is really tied to my personal values.

I also joined Faire because of where the design team and the business is right now. There’s a big opportunity to deepen the relationship with our customers and have a larger impact on the local economy, and truly cement Faire’s purpose and reason for being. It’s a big time to really build it up, which is exciting for me.

What excites you about supporting independent brands and retailers?

My mom has been a serial small business owner for a while. I’m originally from El Salvador, born and raised in Central America. Coming from a Latino Catholic household, she got married really young when she was 24. And then, after a couple of years of being a stay-at-home mom, she was like, “I can’t do this anymore!” So she basically built a small shoe-making business in the spare room, working with a handful of artisans to produce her designs. That really fueled her love for running businesses. She’s owned all kinds of retail and food businesses since then. It’s always been a point of admiration for me, for people that follow that journey and commit to launching a small business with so much heart and passion for it.

Traditionally, small businesses have been the cornerstone of empowering disenfranchised or underserved communities. It has been women — particularly single moms, women of color, and immigrants — that have had a harder time joining the corporate ranks and have instead built a life for themselves with a small business. Specifically, with immigrants, there’s a really big correlation between small business fueling cultural experiences, and evolving local culture into something richer. So from that perspective, it really, truly is a powerful economic tool to uplift local economies, build rich cultural experiences, and provide opportunities for generations. That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about for our brand.

How do you think about the role of brand in a business?

Brand, to me, is the soul of a business. The product is essentially the functional piece that solves a problem that our customers have. The product is the basis of our business, but the brand is its purpose. It’s that emotional piece between our customers and our reason for being, as a business.

That has a lot of manifestations: brand design, voice and tone, press, storytelling, and more. We have a lot of partners that work with us, but building a brand from the perspective of creative and design is, in my opinion, building the language in which we communicate with our customers.

What did your career journey look like before coming to Faire?

My passion has always been brand design. I went to design school and started doing brand design for a small studio in Boston. Working at that studio, I started to understand how important this work was for small businesses — it really determined their identity, their purpose and reason for being, and their relationship with their customers.

After that, I moved to LA and jumped into fashion, and learned a lot about e-commerce and digital marketing in the process. This is a trait of mine — once I’ve done something, I want to move on and learn something different. I’ve always believed in this multifaceted, multidisciplinary approach to creative work.

After working in fashion, I really wanted to get back into the agency side of things, but to work on big campaign platforms and conceptual advertising work. I got a job at a medium-sized agency in LA, where I worked closely with directors and writers on figuring out how design could elevate ideas for campaigns. I learned the ropes of art direction and storytelling and started to get a really holistic point of view of how a brand communicates through all of its channels.

That’s where I realized: I wanted to be able to control all of a brand’s expression. I wanted to do everything. Because I’m really hungry about things, I decided that I needed to work in-house because that’s where you can actually take a look at all of the touchpoints. So I took a job at Disney, and eventually found my way into tech with Airbnb. I got what I was looking for there: that 360-degree, integrated experience of how you control a brand and a message in everything from an email, a TV ad, a landing page, to a billboard. At Airbnb, we used to call it “from button to billboard,” meaning everything along that whole customer experience journey.

That was what I was looking for — and I think that has shaped the way that I’ve continued my career since, moving from Airbnb to Robinhood, and now to Faire.

How do you think about leadership and managing the people on your team?

My role, and the role of any manager, is first to take care of the team. I make sure that they’re effective and they’re putting out great work, and that they feel supported.

But you also need to help your team grow. What is the next step for each individual, and how can I help you get there? How can we shape your experience at the company, the kind of work that you do, to get you to that next level? This might look very different for different people. It might look like a bigger title, deeper expertise, trying something new, becoming a manager — how can I help you get there?

Long story short, it’s getting to really know the team that you have the privilege to direct — getting to really know what drives them and where they want to go, and helping them get there with a perspective of connecting the needs for the business to that roadmap that they have for themselves. I want to be able to help my team get to the next level in their careers, whatever that may be.

What do you want to build at Faire?

The bigger brush stroke is: how do we celebrate the Faire community in a way that it feels like we are building this deeper connection with them? We’re not just solving a problem, we’re a partner. That means not only providing the tools they need to make their businesses better, but we also support why they’re embarking on this journey and we believe in them.

There’s a lot we can do with our brand outside of the actual, digital product. Lots more to come!

To learn more about what it’s like to design and build for one of the world’s most innovative platforms, check out our blog, The Craft, or take a peek at open roles.