Howdy! 👋

I'm Amanda: a brand strategist and marketer. I help founder-led businesses turn belief into brand—and brand into a strategic asset. I share weekly deep dives with actionable advice on brand building—plus interviews with the people in the trenches. I also work 1:1 with founders and teams. If you’d like to learn more, you can book a chat here.

If you know me, you know I’m a voracious reader. I was recently asked what resources I’d recommend for a brand strategist or brand builder to read, so I compiled them below. I’ll add to this as I find new and interesting things: My goal is to build this into something that is a living library of the most helpful resources around.

Start here ⬇️

When I first joined a brand agency, I asked my boss—a brilliant strategist—what I should be reading to get good at this job. He gave me a few specific recommendations (some are included below—like anything by Michael Bierut). But what I quickly realized was that the best strategists I knew (including him) had something more: a mental rolodex of references. Not just frameworks, but brands, campaigns, business models, founders, and turning points.

Starting out without that context was hard. But it also meant I built my own from scratch—part self-taught, part crowdsourced from brilliant minds I followed online (it was 2016... we’re all on LinkedIn or Bluesky now), and part pure curiosity. I wanted to understand how great brands were made—and why they mattered.

I’ve now built brands on both the agency and client side, and studied them relentlessly in between. The common thread? I’m drawn to brands built with courage, commitment, and conviction. You’ll see a strong lean toward founder-led companies in this list. That’s no accident: founders have an outsized impact on brand, they punch above their weight in the market—and frankly, they’re who I love working with.

Whether you’re a founder or a fellow strategist, the best advice I can give you is this: consume and synthesize. Build your own mental rolodex. Start to form a hypothesis around the kinds of brands you're uniquely suited to help—and why.

Here’s how this database is broken down 👇

• Brand | Robust books on brand, brand strategy, and building something people actually care about.
• Companies | Deep dives into how real companies (and founders) built what they did.
• Work | Fresh thinking on how, why, and for whom we work—and what needs to change.
• Leadership | No fluff, just real talk on leading people, making decisions, and navigating the messy middle.
• Creativity | Tools, rituals, and reminders to help you keep making things—even when it’s hard.