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Rehan Shaikh

Marketing & Creative Strategy

Booking from January 2027

Make people care.

I’m Rehan Shaikh, a marketer and creative strategist. I help founders and brand teams find the one thing worth saying — then build the campaigns, content and growth engines that make it stick.

Start a projectSee selected work

Recently

No. 01Selected work

Ideas that paid for themselves.

Three stories about finding the insight, then making it pay. A longer list follows.

Case 01

Direct-to-consumer coffee

2025

Fig. 01Launch key visual. Ran on metro screens and as the lid of every first box.

Mira Coffee Co.

Strategy lead & creative direction

The insight

“Nobody wants a more premium coffee. They want a better first ten minutes of the day.”

Mira arrived with great beans and the same deck as every specialty roaster: origin stories, tasting notes, tiny farms. We moved the brand from the cup to the morning around it — deliveries timed to your routine, packaging built for one hand, and a launch campaign about the clock rather than the coffee.

Results

  • 9 daysto sell out the first roast
  • 41kpeople on the pre-launch waitlist
  • 3.2×return on paid social in month one

Case 02

Consumer fintech

2024

Fig. 02Campaign platform. One line, carried through product, store and paid.

Fold

Brand & growth lead, interim

The insight

“People don’t want to save money. They want to stop thinking about it.”

Fold had a capable product and a category problem: every savings app sold discipline, and nobody wants more discipline. We repositioned it as the quiet one — automatic, unshowy, working in the background — then rebuilt the funnel, store listing and creative around that single idea.

Results

  • +212%organic installs in two quarters
  • −38%blended customer acquisition cost
  • No. 4in Finance on the App Store, launch week

Case 03

Furniture & interiors

2023

Fig. 03The repair promise, as it appeared in print and in-store.

Halden

Strategy & content direction

The insight

“Furniture isn’t bought. It’s lived with — for decades.”

Halden was being dragged into a price war with brands built to be replaced. Instead of discounting, we leaned into longevity: a forty-year repair promise, an editorial series following pieces through the homes that own them, and a showroom designed for sitting rather than browsing.

Results

  • +64%average order value
  • 3.1×time on site after the content relaunch
  • 22%of revenue from repeat customers, up from 9%

Archive

2022 — 2024

And a few more.

Further projects, with outcomes
ClientOutcome
Northwind FreightCategory narrative for a B2B logistics platform$2.1M sourced pipeline
Kiln & Co.Founder-led content for a ceramics studio0 → 180k followers
Pulse HealthLifecycle and retention rebuild+27% 90-day retention
Studio OchreRebrand and website launch2.4× inbound leads
Tandem BikesCommunity-led launch across three cities1,800 pre-orders
Lumen SkincarePaid social creative system−31% cost per acquisition

No. 02Principles

Strategy is mostly subtraction.

Most marketing problems are solved by saying less, to fewer people, more memorably. Five things I cross out early in every engagement.

  1. 01

    Go viral.

    Be worth repeating.

    Reach is rented. The ideas people retell on their own are the only ones that compound.

  2. 02

    Target audience.

    Actual people.

    Personas don’t buy anything. I’d rather spend a week in your support inbox than a day in a workshop.

  3. 03

    More content.

    Fewer, better ideas.

    One strong idea executed forty ways will outperform forty ideas executed once.

  4. 04

    Brand awareness.

    Brand memory.

    Being seen is cheap. Being remembered at the moment someone is ready to buy is the whole game.

  5. 05

    Best practice.

    Better questions.

    Best practice is average performance, well documented. The edge is usually in the question nobody asked.

No. 03Practice

Where I’m most useful.

Five disciplines, one point of view. Most engagements draw on two or three of them; the best ones use all five.

  1. 01

    Brand strategy

    Positioning, narrative and messaging that give every team the same sentence to rally around.

    • Positioning
    • Brand platform
    • Messaging architecture
    • Naming
  2. 02

    Creative direction

    Campaign ideas with legs, and the craft to make them land — from first concept to final frame.

    • Campaign platforms
    • Art direction
    • Copywriting
    • Agency briefs
  3. 03

    Growth marketing

    Performance that doesn’t cost you the brand. Funnels, paid social and experiments tied to revenue.

    • Paid social
    • Funnel & CRO
    • Lifecycle & CRM
    • Measurement
  4. 04

    Content & social

    Editorial systems that turn founders and teams into the most interesting voice in their category.

    • Content strategy
    • Founder-led content
    • Social
    • Community
  5. 05

    Go-to-market

    Launches planned like campaigns and run like operations — market, channel, timing and pricing story.

    • Launch planning
    • Channel strategy
    • Pricing narrative
    • Sales enablement

Ways to work together.

Senior-led, start to finish

  • 3 weeks

    Strategy Sprint

    For teams who need clarity, fast. Positioning, messaging and a campaign platform you can brief any agency against.

    Fixed scope, fixed feeEnquire

  • 8–14 weeks

    Launch Partner

    From insight to in-market. I lead strategy and creative direction through launch, alongside your team or a crew I assemble.

    Project fee, milestone billingEnquire

  • Quarterly

    Fractional Brand Lead

    A senior marketer embedded two days a week. Planning, creative oversight, hiring — and the occasional hard conversation.

    Monthly retainerEnquire

No. 04Proof

The receipts.

Numbers first, then a few of the people who were in the room.

  • 9

    years

    in marketing — agency, in-house, then independent.

  • 60+

    brands

    from pre-seed startups to listed companies.

  • $48M1

    revenue

    attributed to campaigns I’ve led.

  • 11

    launches

    taken from a blank page to in-market.

  1. 1Client-reported, 2019–2026. Attribution methods vary by client — ask me how we measured it.
“Rehan walked into a messy room, listened for an hour, and left with the one sentence we’d all been circling. That sentence became the company.”
Ananya RaoCo-founder, Mira Coffee Co.
“The only marketer I’ve worked with who cares as much about the spreadsheet as the storyboard.”
Daniel OkaforCEO, Fold
“Calm, direct and unreasonably good at headlines. We’ve hired him three times.”
Sofie LundBrand Director, Halden

No. 05About

A strategist who still likes writing the headline.

Fig. 04Rehan Shaikh, Mumbai

I started at a small agency writing social copy at midnight, and learned early that the posts that worked weren’t the cleverest — they were the clearest. Nine years on, that’s still most of the job.

Since then I’ve led brand and growth for start-ups and scale-ups, built content engines for founders, and run launches from Mumbai to London. These days I work independently with a handful of teams at a time, so the person on the first call is the person doing the work.

Currently
Independent. Partnering with founders and marketing leads.
Previously
Head of Brand at a consumer fintech; strategist at an independent creative agency.
Based in
Mumbai, working across time zones.
Off the clock
Test cricket, old ad annuals, and overthinking playlists.

No. 06Contact

Booking from January 2027

Got something worth saying?

I take on a small number of projects each quarter. Tell me what you’re building and where it’s stuck — I reply to every message within two working days.

Write to

hello@shaikhrehan.com
Request a 20-minute intro call