During my summer at Opal Wearables, I primarily worked on developing and producing multimedia assets in preparation for the brand's fall 2023 product launch. Opal's smart safety ring is a stylish piece of jewelry with a secret button that can send SOS alerts to emergency services and contacts. At the start of the summer, I interviewed founder Jen Chiang to develop a brand book and style guide that would direct all our marketing, brand, and communications moving forward. By the end of the summer, I wrote and produced four thought leadership articles and an original video library to use for online promotion throughout the launch campaign. Altogether, my work served to connect Opal to its target customer base — young professional women — in a meaningful and authentic way.

Developing the brand book and style guide required me to revisit business model frameworks adopted from entrepreneurship courses like Foundations of Entrepreneurship and Think Bigger. It became my job as a marketing and brand strategist to develop aesthetics and marketing collateral that personified brand values outlined in the company's mission, vision, value propositions, and target customers. I also helped the team conduct consumer research studies that helped guide both marketing and product development. Together, we collected surveys that employed research techniques from Marketing and Launch Your Startup. Putting these theoretical principles into practice helped me truly appreciate how rigorous startup marketing could be.

As a whole, Opal struggled with shifting and tentative product timelines, whose uncertainty rippled into our marketing work. I would have had a more hands-on role in the product launch, which was originally scheduled for August, but when we pushed it back to September, I had to readjust my multimedia deliverables to become more flexible and adaptable. Because we were actively publishing work like social media videos and thought leadership blogs, we had to confirm each one's “call to action” for that week, knowing we were not yet ready to accept preorders but wished to get some concrete form of traction. At the end of the day, we at least succeeded in expanding Opal's presence across online channels and arming the future marketing team with templates and assets that are ready to use.

Although I myself am an entrepreneur who has run a bootstrapped media business and a social venture, I did not feel stakes were as high as they were with Opal, a company with VC funding and a physical product. It was humbling to work with founders Jen Chiang and Lance Norman, who were betting their careers on an emerging market with a social cause. For my last article with Opal, I used Bloomberg and other sources to dig up market insights and get a better hold on the future of safety wearables. I also interviewed startups who leaned more towards the health monitoring niche of the industry. Seeing as only a handful of companies are only now gaining a foothold, I gained an admiration for founders in this new space. I realized, even if I did engage in more research work throughout this fellowship, no amount of data would fully assure me that a brand new product like the Opal smart ring would take off in the market. Even though I am ending my current term with Opal, I remain spiritually invested in its success and its mission.