Client: Marisa Guthrie, ethical business coach and author of The Reluctant Capitalist (Practical Inspiration Publishing, 2026)
Marisa Guthrie: a brand for the reluctant capitalist
Services:
Brand strategy, brand architecture, creative direction, website architecture and SEO, wireframing and page copy structure, Squarespace build, launch-event landing page, post-launch audit
Marisa Guthrie helps women build businesses that pay well without asking them to give up what they believe. In October 2026 she published her first book, The Reluctant Capitalist, and ran a free online summit to launch it. We spent [six months] alongside her building the brand, the strategy, and the website to carry all of it.
Marisa's work had outgrown its container. Her coaching business, her new book and her Substack each had their own name and their own pull, and her old website still spoke for a coaching practice she'd moved past.
The launch raised a real question: should the book become the brand? Getting that wrong would ripple through the logo, the site structure, the SEO and every platform she shows up on.
There was a second constraint, just as important. Marisa's whole message is anti-hustle. The usual coaching playbook — urgency timers, results-first headlines, stacked testimonials — would have contradicted her before a visitor read a word. The brand had to earn trust the way she does: quietly, with substance.
Making room for a different conversation about business
We started with a brand ecosystem workshop to map everything Marisa does and how each piece feeds the others. The biggest decision came out of it: the book would not become the brand. The Reluctant Capitalist is the book's identity. The Ethical Entrepreneurship Ecosystem™, her six-month coaching methodology, anchors everything else.
That one call shaped the rest. The site architecture, the SEO plan and the navigation all follow it, with the book page built as the search home for the title. We also set out which channels Marisa owns and which she rents: Kit holds her email list, Substack is where she writes. The list is the insurance.
Strategy: one ecosystem, clear roles
Creative direction: Stone & Gold
Marisa wanted her ideal client to feel one thing on arrival: finally, someone who gets it. We built the creative direction around three words — relief, resonance and recognition.
The result is Stone & Gold: an earthy palette of cream, ink, gold, terracotta and olive, drawn from Dartmoor moorland and late-afternoon light. An editorial serif carries the literary voice; a humanist sans keeps it approachable. Our working rule was warmth, not softness — warmth through material richness and earthy colour, never pastels or script fonts.
We grounded the direction in six references Marisa chose, from Studio Hardie's dark-and-light section rhythm to Hiut Denim's numbered essays. We named what to leave out just as clearly: no testimonial grids, no urgency mechanics, no marketing jargon.
We designed and built nine pages in Squarespace: Home, About, Writing, Work With Me, Book, Contact, a launch summit page, and the privacy and terms pages. Each one holds one job and one next step.
Every page went through wireframes and a copy structure before the build. We explored darker and lighter photography on the homepage and chose the darker, moodier treatment, which kept text readable and gave the pages emotional depth. The About page reads as a set of numbered chapters, closer to a long-form essay than a sales page.
For the book launch we designed the landing page for Make Money Make Change, a free online summit on 22 October 2026 with four guest conversations about making money without exploitation. Registration ran straight to Zoom, with Kit handling a single reminder and follow-up — no funnel.
The new site went live in early October. We wrote SEO settings for every page, then audited the live site across phone, tablet and desktop, tracking each fix to launch-ready.
Book Launch and Online Summit
what we made and the outcome
What we made
Brand ecosystem workshop and ecosystem map
Brand architecture: the EEE as the core framework, the book as its own identity
Stone & Gold creative direction brief, mood boards and layout reference panel
[Logo suite and icon set]
Website architecture and SEO strategy
Wireframes and copy structure for all nine pages
Squarespace build, live October 2026
Make Money Make Change summit landing page
Page-by-page SEO settings and a post-launch site audit
The outcome
Marisa now has one brand that holds her coaching, her book and her writing without any of them competing. Her site sounds like her: unhurried, serious about money, and clear about what it won't do to sell.
Brand and web are the foundation; we'll help you build a creative ecosystem around them.