KIAI Agency

Welcome (back!), Emily! Joining us again as a Senior Designer, because once a monkey... 🐒🥹

Hi, I’m Emily, Senior Designer here at KIAI 👩‍🎨🎨

I’ve been working in design for over two decades and my journey started back in university while studying Advertising. I still remember the thrill of discovering CorelDRAW.. it opened up a whole new world for me. Since then, I’ve explored many areas of design, but what’s always stayed with me is the joy of creating something from scratch. I love having the freedom to shape visual ideas, and I’ve always been more drawn to crafting than just following a process.

I’ve known Daniela, KIAI’s founder, for over 25 years. We first worked together long before KIAI existed, and I was part of the agency in an earlier chapter as well. Coming back felt natural. I chose to return to KIAI because of the welcoming spirit, the supportive team, and the meaningful work we do with our clients.

Outside of design, music is a big part of my life. Singing is my second passion — I even considered it as a career at one point! — and my husband is a musician too. We have two beautiful kids who keep my hands (and heart) very full. Spending time with my family is when I feel most grounded—and that balance is what fuels my creativity at work 💚

Today, 9 years ago, KIAI Comunicação Integrada (Integrated Communications in Portuguese) became KIAI Agency. One of the scariest things I’ve done in my life. It was only me, Daniela, and Rod, my husband. We hired someone to redesign our green monkey, we created our own website, we studied the Canadian market as much as we could, and we launched. We had very few close friends from Brazil that “liked” the announcement and that was it. There were no clients to see the post, and no local friends to cheer us up.

Announcing a launch is actually easy. How do you go from there to actually start the work? One thing I learned with our own launch is that you have to make a BIG first impression. Instead of just saying “We are open”, I later understood that I should have said SO.MUCH.MORE. At the very least, I should have shared:
- Who we are
- Our Services
- Our ideal clients
- The problems we could solve for them
- Our portfolio
- Our approach

Most of the time, it’s not that you don’t know how to market yourself, or how to present your brand. You’re just overwhelmed, and terrified. My advice for that? Fake that confidence until you actually have it. When you open yourself and your business with a great level of energy and enthusiasm, it attracts the right people.

We all have bad days and countless are the times that I just wanted to give it all up and get a job. I am so proud of what we have done and achieved in these last 9 years. We have impacted thousands of people with our work, with hundreds of amazing clients - even the bad ones I’m grateful for, they thought me good lessons. We created strong brands, beautiful logos, effective websites, marketing campaigns, fun social media channels, and so much more.

And I know that the best is yet to come, because the journey of the entrepreneur is to always climb a mountain. I just have to remind myself to stay connected to the now so I can enjoy the view while we’re climbing it.

Thank you for everyone that has supported us in one way or another. We are KIAI 🐒💚