Oprah’s “O” is recognizable anywhere. Say, “You’re fired,” to any American, and it will conjure up visions of dirty-blonde toupees and failed presidential nominations.
But two UF juniors are trying to make sure students know personal branding isn’t just for celebrities.
Luis De Las Salas and Katie Burns have started their own nonprofit personal branding agency because they said they realized an overflowing resume isn’t enough to make students stand out anymore — it has to have character.
Luis + Katie Personal Branding aims to create memorable brands for individual students in order to make them more marketable to potential employers.
Burns said she hopes the service will “help students better their professional selves and creative digital identities.”
Personal branding is a relatively new strategy that helps facilitate self-promotion in a job market saturated with social media. For Luis + Katie Personal Branding, that means resumes, headshots, logos and cover-letter coaching.
Public relations major Burns and advertising major De Las Salas, both 21, got the idea for the business at 3 a.m. one night when De Las Salas was playing around with Adobe Photoshop. Burns took a peek at De Las Salas’ work and complimented it.
A light bulb went off, and now they’re getting compliments from clients.
“What I like about what they’ve done is that they’ve added another personal dimension to things that are usually business-like,” said 21-year-old UF Spanish senior David Soto, who hired them to re-work his resume.
Clients can hire Luis + Katie Personal Branding through its Facebook page or by emailing lkpbranding@gmail.com.
Burns and De Las Salas always sit down with their clients and get to know them before they begin any work. On a recent project for their friend Andrew Kays, the pair brainstormed how to best convey Kays’ personality and strengths through a logo.
They wanted to know, “What makes Andrew, Andrew?” said De Las Salas.
Andrew is scientific and higher-thinking, he said, so Luis + Katie Personal Branding designed a logo to look like an element on the periodic table — with Kays’ graduation year as the atomic number and his phone number as its weight.
Burns and De Las Salas have branded their own business as a young, outgoing and service-oriented agency. All of Luis + Katie Personal Branding’s profits will go to a new charity every quarter, Burns said.
Their first beneficiary will be Dance Marathon. But so far, they haven’t charged their clients a penny; they’re still determining the price.
Burns said the agency is nonprofit because the design duo is getting just as much out of the experience as its clients.
“We’re helping people out and still learning from the whole process,” she said.
[A version of this story ran on page 8 on 2/11/2014 under the headline "Students to sell personal branding"]
