Latch living
From product company to space company: manifesto, voice, and a million-dollar campaign
Latch made smart locks. That was the problem.
Not the technology — which was genuinely interesting. A unified access platform: one credential, every door, every space. Hardware and software designed together to make the physical world feel frictionless.
But "smart lock company" was a ceiling. A feature, not a vision. Latch needed a different idea at its center, one that put it in the conversation with companies reimagining how people live — not companies selling commodity hardware.
My job was to find that idea and build everything from it.
The brief
Two problems. The first: what does Latch actually believe? Not what it makes — what it stands for. The second: how do you launch a new brand idea in a way that earns attention rather than just announces it?
A manifesto that stays on a website is a document. One that becomes a campaign, becomes film, becomes the language a sales team uses, becomes what employees say when someone asks what they do — that's a brand.
The brief required range. From the philosophical to the granular. Both had to be right. Both had to feel like the same voice.
The challenge
I started with what the company already believed but hadn't yet said out loud. Latch wasn't selling locks. It was trying to remove the friction that keeps people from imagining what their spaces could be. The keys that weigh down your bag, the access cards that expire, the front desks that gatekeep the places you're supposed to belong. The insight wasn't about hardware. It was about what you're free to imagine when the physical world stops getting in the way.
"Spaces liberate us instead of limit us."
From that line I built the full brand architecture: positioning platform, manifesto, tone of voice framework.
Manifesto:
The work
The tone of voice framework governed how Latch should sound in every context — from a sales pitch to a product label to a social post:
Then the campaign. There was nothing. I found the creative territory, wrote the voiceover, and stayed in the work from that blank page through production and launch. The sizzle debuted at Latch's annual company event:
The sizzle was produced for internal use with unlicensed reference footage to communicate the brand vision. I wrote the concepts and scripts for five campaign ads that followed for external launch.
The company later rebranded to DOOR. The positioning held.
One brand transformed from product to platform
Five videos conceived, scripted and launched
$1M+ campaign budget
The results
Latch didn't need better words for what it did. It needed a worldview. Once you have one, everything else — the manifesto, the campaign, the voice, the scripts — becomes a translation problem: how do you say this true thing in a way that lands?
That's the work I find most interesting. Not the brief that hands you the answer. The one that makes you find it.
The takeaway
I help you build your brand so you can build the future
