CarMax
Sports Marketing & Partnerships
Partnership strategy · Brand consistency at scale · Agency direction
Translating the CarMax brand into a connected creative experience across partnerships, stadium environments, digital, social and fan-facing touchpoints.
Context: CarMax invested in women’s sports — partnering with the WNBA and NWSL — to reach a fast-growing, highly engaged fan base. Sports partnerships bring together multiple environments, audiences and stakeholders. My role is to help translate the CarMax brand into creative experiences that feel distinctive in each context while remaining part of a one recognizable brand system.
Challenge: A partnership can quickly become a collection of disconnected executions. The creative challenge was to establish a clear point of view that could work across high-impact physical environments, digital placements, social content, and partner requirements without losing the brand.
My Role: I led and supported creative development across sports marketing and partnership applications. I set the brand standards, reviewed and approved partner and league creative, and directed an outside sports marketing agency to deliver the work.
Approach: I treated the work as an ecosystem rather than a series of individual placements. I looked for repeatable visual behaviors, strong brand moments, and flexible graphic elements that could create continuity from the stadium to the screen. The work required alignment across teams with different priorities and production constraints. I helped establish creative direction, facilitated exploration, resolved visual inconsistencies, and kept the larger brand experience in view while individual deliverables moved quickly.
Outcome: An 11% increase in brand recognition and a 15% lift in brand usage among NWSL fans during the 2024 season. Brand recognition increased by 11% from 2024, with a 180% ROI during the WNBA All-Star event in 2025.
Partner & Cross-Functional Collaboration
I served as the connective tissue between CarMax’s brand team and a wide network of external partners — the WNBA, NWSL, and individual team marketing departments, broadcasters including CBS and ESPN, and CarMax’s external sports marketing agency. Each partner operated under its own approval process, technical specs, and brand guidelines, so alignment meant constant two-way translation: adapting our brand system to a broadcaster’s on-air requirements one week, and training a team’s local marketing staff on our logo system the next.
Internally, I worked closely with brand marketing, legal/rights, and the retail team to make sure every partnership asset met both CarMax’s brand standards and each league’s contractual requirements before it shipped. I built a lightweight review process — templates and quick-turn approval checkpoints — so partner teams and the agency could move fast without needing me to sign off on every individual asset.
In practice, this made creative direction less about producing any single execution and more about setting the standard once, then supporting a network of internal and external teams in applying it correctly, at speed, across dozens of touchpoints a season.
CarMax Park — Branding
Opening Day on April 7, 2026, at CarMax Park marked a significant milestone for the company — the launch of a premium venue in Richmond designed not just for baseball, but also as a gathering space for the community. This event highlights CarMax's commitment to investing in the city it proudly calls home. More than just a ballgame, it embodies CarMax's belief in fostering community growth and creating environments where families and neighbors can come together.
I played a key role in developing the branding and integrating the Wanna Drive design system to ensure brand consistency throughout CarMax Park. This included creating signage and wayfinding, designing gameday graphics, and implementing brand applications that make the space unmistakably CarMax, all while emphasizing its deep-rooted connection to Richmond.
