Fractional creative direction for DTC brands that have outgrown agencies.
Book a CallSound familiar?
If your brand is running ads but the creative is the bottleneck, you're not alone.
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Agencies treat you like a number.
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Output plateaued. Same hooks. Same angles.
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You have raw assets sitting unused.
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You're the founder doing creative direction yourself, badly.
Philosophy
Psychology First.
Emotion Before Information.
Every piece of creative this studio produces runs on proven persuasion frameworks. Not vibes. Structure. The kind that moves people.
Raw
The truth of your brand, your customer, your market. Not what you wish it was. What it is. We start here every time.
Formed
The systems, scripts, and structures that turn raw material into output. AIDA. PAS. Callaway Story Arc. Curiosity loops. The 3-step hook formula. Applied, not quoted.
Repeat
Testing, iterating, compounding. Creative that works gets scaled. Creative that doesn't gets replaced. No attachment to the work, only to the results.
Services
What we do
Fractional Creative Direction
Monthly retainer. I become your brand. Strategy, scripts, oversight, weekly direction calls.
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Brand Audit & Strategy Sprint
7-day full audit across creative, brand, site, and funnel. Delivered as a Notion doc and 60-min walkthrough.
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Launch & Build
New brand launches: positioning, identity direction, content system, first 30 days of creative.
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Studio Tools Access
Clients get access to the Raw & Formed portal: ad scoring, audit generators, hook libraries, brief builders.
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Selected Work
Brands we've built
BENI Bed
3x ROAS on cold traffic. Hook testing framework reduced creative fatigue by 60%.
ManUp
Full funnel creative rebuild. ROAS improved from 1.4x to 2.9x in 60 days.
Naming This Later
Brand architecture and full creative system built from scratch. First campaign live in 30 days.
Pureluum
Creative direction across 40+ UGC pieces. Scaled to $80k/mo Meta spend.
Surfmud
Brand story redefined. New creative direction launched across all channels.
Founder photo coming soon
The Studio
I'm Kai. South African, building DTC brands, running ads, directing creative for the last four years.
Raw & Formed isn't an agency. I run my own brands, which means when I work with yours, I treat it like mine. I'm selective. I take on three retainer clients at a time. If the fit isn't there, I'll tell you.
The studio exists because I got tired of watching great products fail because the creative was generic. Most agencies don't think about psychology. They think about deliverables. Those are two different things.