Brand Strategy
Positioning, websites, and virtual experiences that help brands show up polished, clear, and aligned with who they are.
Sisters in Sport STRIDE Social Media Campaign
Middlebury, VT
January 2022
A proposal created for the STRIDE Foundation (The Wright Foundation for Female Athletes) to keep young female athletes connected with their mentors during COVID-19 social distancing.
The goal
Build positive, supportive relationships for female athletes through virtual mentorship, using a consistent presence on Facebook and Instagram. Its motto is “Empower. Connect. Mentorship.”
Participants
Three programs: Snow Stars Alpine, Snow Stars Nordic (skiing), and Sisters in Sport (basketball).
How it works
At least one post per week, with more encouraged
Templates provided for select content
College mentors appointed as administrators with creative control
Content formats
Player Highlight Profiles (mentees): weekly spotlights celebrating elementary and middle school athletes’ growth, perseverance, and ambitions, using a headshot or action photo plus 2–3 short action videos. Mentees can also use them to build an athletic portfolio.
“Try This Drill!” Reels (basketball mentors): tutorials and demonstrations of favorite drills, often filmed at college practices.
“Get Ready With Me” Reels (ski mentors): ski patrol and cross-country mentors showing how they layer, gear up, and do a final check.
Selfie submissions: an open call for athletes to be featured.
Size Matters: Investigating Size Ranges in Popular Lingerie Brands
#FashionWeek on Twitter: An Interactive Analysis of Brands Driving Conversation
Research questions
How often was fashion week discussed each year, and who drove the conversation? Are verified or unverified users more active and influential? Which brands were mentioned, and how did their audiences change over time? Where did fashion week conversations come from, and how did users feel about each fashion week?
Data and methods
The dataset, scraped by Gyula Zsombok, contains every tweet mentioning fashion week from 2020 to 2023. To measure who was shaping the conversation, I created an influence score for each posting account: followers + 1 divided by following + 1, multiplied by the account's total tweets + 1, then log-scaled (base 10). This estimates an account's reach and activity. The tweet count box plots compare how active the accounts discussing each brand were, based on their lifetime number of tweets. The Leaflet maps show where each fashion week's conversation came from and how influential those voices were, and sentiment analysis with the sentimentr package scores the tone of the 25 most influential tweets for each city.
Key findings
The conversation around luxury houses shifted in revealing ways. Accounts discussing Louis Vuitton became more active from 2020 through 2022 before easing in 2023, suggesting the brand drew an increasingly engaged audience during those years. Balenciaga's audience told a different story: influence scores clustered tightly around the average from 2020 to 2022, then spread toward lower scores in 2023, as more smaller, less established accounts joined the conversation. That shift coincided with the brand's widely criticized late-2022 ad campaign controversy. Mapping Paris Fashion Week in 2022 showed how a single city's event becomes a global conversation, with posts from North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. And the most influential voices discussing Paris were mostly neutral in tone, suggesting they tended to inform and discuss rather than simply praise.
Challenges and what I refined
I originally wanted to track whether celebrities were mentioned in fashion week tweets, but reliably identifying celebrity names in text proved too complex within the project timeline. Building the Shiny app also pushed me to prioritize: with so much I wanted to cover, I had to be strategic to tell a clear story, and the longer my code grew, the harder it became to connect my buttons to my graphics.
Revisiting the project in 2026, I solved that last challenge by restructuring the app so every brand, year, and city selection runs through a single streamlined function. I also tightened the text matching so abbreviations like "LV" and "NY" no longer pick up unrelated words, and adjusted the charts to zoom without dropping data, making the analysis both more accurate and easier to maintain.
Introduction
High Fashion Twitter is a corner of the platform for people who love high fashion or work in the industry, though anyone can join the conversation. The community gained its biggest recognition in 2020, when Vogue covered @HFMetGala, an inclusive online Met Gala created by a group of accounts so everyone could participate. This project analyzes how that community discussed the big four fashion weeks (New York, London, Milan, and Paris) and seven luxury houses (Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Dior, Balenciaga, Prada, Valentino, and Yves Saint Laurent) between 2020 and 2023.
Website Design
kthescholar.com (2026)
Kthescholar.com (Before)
Kthescholar.com (After)
Kthescholar.com (After)