A Brand Strategist with an Outdated Website

I build brands for a living. I tell clients to clarify their positioning, tighten their visual language, get ruthless about font choices, decide who they’re talking to and commit to it. I preach simplicity like it’s gospel. And somewhere between year six and year eight of running Vagari Creative, my own website became the thing I warn my clients about, the kind of site that makes you question whether the person behind it believes what they’re selling.

It wasn’t a crash. It was creep.

A new service got tacked on. A different font felt right at the time. The messaging got softer, more inclusive, which meant less clear. The layout collected features the way a junk drawer collects takeout menus. Nothing was broken, nothing screamed bad, but nothing said anything decisive either. If you landed on my site, you’d have to work to understand what I do and who I do it for. That’s the opposite of what I’m supposed to be teaching.

The harder part was seeing it. When you live inside something every day, the rot becomes invisible. You stop noticing the inconsistency because you’re the one who made it and you remember the intention behind each decision, even if the intention isn’t clear to anyone else. So I didn’t fix it for a long time. I talked about fixing it. I planned the rebuild. I sketched ideas. And then I’d open the site and my eyes would slide right past it because my brain was too familiar with the shape.

That’s when I realized: I needed me. Not someone else with a different perspective and fresh eyes, but me, doing for myself what I do for clients. A brand strategist’s own brand is the hardest one to see clearly.

It took pulling in help (learning Figma, getting honest about what mattered visually, stripping everything down to black, yellow, pink, teal, and breathing room), but the rebuild wasn’t about fixing the site. It was about practicing what I preach when it’s hardest, when you’re tired and the old way feels like less work than changing it. When you’ve built something and you’re supposed to love it, even though you don’t.

Here’s what shifted: black and white homepage. One font for headers, one for body text. Pricing that’s visible instead of buried. Clarity about what services I offer and clarity about the kind of clients I work with. No hedge, no softness, no features in hopes of catching everyone. Just simplicity.

And I’m telling you this because every restaurant owner I talk to has a website they built three years ago that needs this same medicine, and every wellness business owner I work with walks in knowing something feels off but not knowing what. They see the problem but can’t see it clearly enough to fix it.

That used to confuse me a little. I’d think, “How don’t you see this?” Now I know: you can’t see your own thing. It’s not a failure of vision, it’s how human brains work. You’re too close, too invested, too used to defending the choices you made when the choices made sense.

So when I talk to a client now about positioning or clarity or cutting unnecessary words, I’m not lecturing from some pure place. I’m talking about something I had to learn on my own first, in my own space, where the stakes felt real and the irony felt sharpening.

The rebuild isn’t about having a better website. It’s about learning that even people who know better need help seeing what’s true about their own thing.