When Suzanne Seager approached us for branding help on her journey with her nurse coaching business, Emerge, her main goal was to guide her clients towards healthy life decisions and encourage them in that. She wanted her clients to feel hope and excitement in their personal walk with health and wellness as it relates to the whole person.

With over twenty years of experience and a certificate in nurse coaching, Suzanne desired to create a brand that would communicate a reliability and authentic trust from coach to client. But what really is health coaching? This is a tension that Emerge’s work lived in. For Suzanne, as a registered nurse, health coaching is 90% assisting people in making changes they have resolved to make, and 10% consulting and educating. Entering the health and wellness world as an individual can be frightening and often anxiety-inducing, with unhelpful and sometimes, degrading standards flying at you from all directions. Historically, it has been difficult for everyday people to find coaches who want to assist in setting and reaching realistic goals for our health. Suzanne saw the gap and found that there was a place for her to step in, being a compassionate coach for her clients. With her extensive clinical background and years of experience and training in behavioral and positive psychology, Suzanne has a unique combination of empathy and experience that sets her apart from other coaches out there. With a coach like Suzanne, clients are met where they are and pushed to meet their personal health and wellness goals.

The team, now helping Suzanne with branding, began to think through the possibility of a new name for her business as Emerge did not quite fit. Suzanne’s abundant warmth and empathy towards potential and current clients stood out to us as a quality to incorporate into her brand. Then, as we drew out themes of Suzanne’s motivations and goals for her business, the name Wellnest was naturally brought forward. Aside from the play on the word “wellness”, we wanted to pull in a different level of intentionality that corresponds with Suzanne’s personality and goals. When you think of a nest, you likely think of a safe place for mother birds to lay their eggs, keeping them warm, and preparing for them to hatch. The baby bird, once hatched, lives in the nest and grows there until it is ready to take flight. This imagery reflects the safety and beauty of what Suzanne offers through her certified nurse coaching. Her clients truly have a soft place to land in Wellnest to live out their health and wellness journeys and ultimately prepare to take flight! With the name “Emerge,” it was all about who you will be after you complete the program, but Wellnest communicated the importance of the process. To our delight, Suzanne loved it, as it captured who she is and why she loves her profession. During our work on the logo we discovered that a swallow often symbolizes new beginnings, hope, determination, and joy, so we chose this bird specifically to be connected to the brand name. The flying swallow represents emotions and feelings that Suzanne wants all of her clients to experience through her nurse coaching program. The possibilities surrounding her brand became real for Suzanne when she remarked that she could envision Wellnest’s logo on a hat someday!

As we developed the brand more, creating the color palette was an absolute joy! We really wanted to create visuals that would give an accurate and inspiring first impression. It was exciting for us to begin communicating—through colors—the health and wellness experience Suzanne wants for her clients in a way that is both holistic and scientific because her work is beautifully balanced between the two. We wanted to create a color palette that depicted determination, clarity, and balance, while still representing Suzanne’s inclusion of evidence-based answers and science. We used hues of bright green and purple balanced by darker shades to present the tension. The leading green colors also reflect growth, new beginnings, and renewal. Our purples represent wisdom, intuition, and peace. We also wanted to incorporate a neutral brown that would convey resilience, dependability, security, and safety. Lastly, a cool and calm peacefulness was brought in with blue green. Instead of designing a palette with one or two colors that could feel rigid and stiff, we produced something with movement and spirit. Altogether, the palette became an integral part of the brand itself and is included in all content. Additionally, we built out a brand guide with social media graphics, templates, and print collateral, bringing a Wellnest hat a little closer to reality.

Not only were we able to help Suzanne create her brand, but we also assisted in small business strategizing. Each conversation with her included many intentional questions that helped as she thought through next steps for Wellnest and what the future of Wellnest looks like to her! We caught a glimpse of the care she brings to her clients in how she treated us, and we’re so excited that we could help to make those initial connections a little easier. To Suzanne, helping clients achieve their goals through certified nurse coaching is a privilege, and we feel the same about having helped her achieve some of her small business goals.