About
Most businesses I meet are better than they look.
I started as a college intern at an ad agency in South Carolina and worked my way up to COO. Ten years there, going up against agencies many times our size and winning work we had no business winning.
What I learned in that stretch is that it was almost never the quality of the work that decided it. It was whether the person on the other side could tell.
Buyers aren't being shallow when they pick the other one. They're deciding with limited information, and they go with whoever seems most likely to be good. That's fixable, and it's the most fun problem in this business to fix.
So I built GiddyBrands to work on it directly. Story first, then the look, then the website, then the marketing that runs on top of it. One system, built by the person you're talking to.
You don't need another campaign.
You need a brand worth campaigning for.
Jake Gianelli
Founder, GiddyBrands · Charlotte, NC
The thinking happens first, so every design choice and every line of copy has a job.
You work directly with me and a tight team of specialists. No account managers, no telephone game.
Positioning, messaging, identity, and the website line up instead of coming from a pile of vendors.
We run remote and keep the team small, so your budget goes into the work rather than overhead.
Shorter sales cycles, stronger referrals, and confidence every time you show up.
Your brand feels DIY next to your work, you're stuck on what to say or who you serve, or you know the bottleneck is there and want it fixed before spending more on marketing.
The knight is the move nobody sees coming. The heart is the reason it lands.
Most marketing right now is assembled out of what everyone else already said. It reads fine and it disappears the second you close the tab. The things actually worth buying, why you started, what you refuse to cut corners on, the standard you hold when nobody is watching, don't exist anywhere a machine can go looking for them.
That's the part we go after first, because everything downstream gets easier once it's on the table.
The freedom to use my time on purpose and build work that matters. That's still how I think about brand, as a lever that buys freedom for the founder, the team, and the business.
I grew up between two worlds, a mom with a designer's brain and a dad in the business world, so strategy and creativity were the family language. I took that into a South Carolina agency, went from intern to COO, and started GiddyBrands in Charlotte in 2023.
When I'm not inside a brand workshop you'll find me in the garage gym, chasing my kids, or on the golf course taking several mulligans while convincing myself I've finally fixed my slice.
Jake Gianelli, Founder
GiddyBrands is run by Jake Gianelli, a Charlotte-based brand strategist who spent fifteen years in agencies and the last ten as COO of a South Carolina firm, running national campaigns for brands like Planet Fitness and Papa John's before starting the studio in 2023. He leads strategy and stays on every project. Behind him is a small remote team of designers, developers, and content creators, brought in by specialty rather than kept on payroll. No account managers, no juniors, and the person you meet on the first call is the person doing the work.
Mostly founder-led businesses in a growth stage, from a handful of people to a few hundred, that have outgrown the brand they started with. Clients range from local shops to international companies, and the work scales with them. The common thread isn't size, it's that the business is stronger than it looks and the owner can feel it costing them. If you're pre-revenue or still figuring out the offer, it's usually too early. If you're growing on referrals and want that to stop being the only lever, it's the right time.
Probably, and it matters less than you'd expect. GiddyBrands has worked across software, finance and advisory, construction and trades, hospitality and travel, professional services, retail, and outdoor recreation, with clients from Charlotte to New Zealand and India. Industry experience helps with vocabulary and speed. What actually decides whether a brand works is whether a stranger can tell what makes you different in the first few seconds, and that problem looks the same in every category. The first week of any build is spent learning your world properly, so nothing gets designed on assumptions.
You need about two to three hours a week during the build, mostly in the first two weeks. That's a strategy workshop, a couple of review calls, and quick approvals along the way. Everything else happens on our side. The process is built for owners who are already running the business, so there's no homework, no long questionnaires, and no waiting on you to write copy. Most clients say it took less of their time than the last website they tried to do themselves.
The order and the people. An agency usually starts with a campaign or a channel and works backwards. GiddyBrands starts with the story, then builds the identity, the website, and the marketing on top of it, so everything points the same direction. And there are no layers. The senior person who wins your business is the one who does it, backed by a small team of specialists instead of a floor of account managers. You own every file from day one, support is month to month, and if we parted tomorrow it would all keep working without us.
Look at the businesses on the portfolio page and ask whether any of them look small. Every one was already good at what they did before the brand caught up, which is the only kind of business this works for. A brand can't fix a weak offer, but it reliably fixes a good one that's being underestimated. The honest test before you spend anything is the fifteen-minute call, where Jake pulls your business up the way a buyer would and tells you what he sees. If the gap isn't there, he'll say so.