1-Hour video, phone, or in-person consultation - $110

Because our initial call will require both of us to do a little bit of work before we meet and you'll leave with some new things to consider, I have a consultation fee of $110 for an hour of time together.

This consultation fee will be waived and go toward your first invoice if you decide we can work together to help you meet your goals!

I've found Venmo is the easiest for my clients.

Peak Services Monthly Retainer - $1,800

Minimum 3-month commitment.

If you are ready for me to dive in to your project with unlimited monthly support, this is the option for you.

I'll ensure you're leveraging tried-and-true marketing philosophy with modern tactics, using all possible creative mediums and communication outlets to help you engage and attract your ideal customers or clients and share your story with the world.

With this monthly retainer, I'll develop all the strategy and we'll work together to execute. I'll aid in developing customer and community-focused initiatives, such as digital and paid social media marketing campaigns, and content and promotion recommendations. I'll also determine target audience profiles, define your competition, and help you determine your overall goals.

This package allows for fully managed prioritization of marketing opportunities to help you reach your goals.

Strategic Marketing Plans - Varied prices

Scalable pricing based on your needs. I’m your idea generator and your resourceful advocate - your friend with the marketing strategy hookup. This means I'll aid in developing customer and community-focused initiatives, such as digital and paid social media marketing campaigns, and content and promotion recommendations. We'll then determine target audience profiles, define your competition, and help you determine your overall goals. Then, I'll recommend prioritization of marketing opportunities to help you reach those goals. You'll do the execution.

Shopify OR Squarespace Website Design

Shopify for businesses with goods to sell: $2,500

Squarespace for artists or portfolio businesses: $1,800

If you are looking for a little bit more hands-on help with your Shopify website design, this is the package for you. I want your website to be everything you imagine!

I will:

Provide full-service Shopify website design including Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and header optimization, with execution, and analysis.
Be available for unlimited support and communication throughout the process, and provide tailored-to-you training so you know how to update your new site once we’re all finished.
Set up your Google Analytics and give you a tour
Brainstorm and develop search keywords
Copywrite website content
Assist with product management, app recommendations, and app management for initial launch. App additions available after launch for an hourly rate.

You will:

Provide me with content you’d “for-sure” like to include on your site! This includes written content, photos, artwork, and any design elements you’re sure you want to include. This also includes reviews and words from your past clients as necessary.
Inform me of any specific styling preferences, functional requirements and general preferences as we go so I know I’m on the right track.
Be available via email and/or in-person meetings for the entire duration of the project for feedback, questions, and communication.

Minimum 1/2 Day Photoshoot - Starting at $550

Branding, lifestyle, and portrait photography to display the best of your business

Execute photo shoots, and provide on-site management or styling

60 day hosting of photos on Pic-Time

Full-day Photoshoot - Starting at $1,000

Branding, lifestyle, and portrait photography to display the best of your business

Execute photo shoots, and provide on-site management or styling

60 day hosting of photos on Pic-Time

Graphic Design - Priced per-project

Priced per-project. Brand-specific graphic design for print and digital, including advertisements, menus, event posters, social media graphics, custom digital graphics and images, and print publication design.

Brand Copywriting and website audits- $60/hour

Priced per-project or hourly. Brand messaging for avenues of communication including blog posts, email newsletters, and social media copywriting. Draft elevator pitches, backgrounders, and company profiles. Audit and rewrite of current website content for SEO opportunities.

Social Media Management - $60/hour

5-10 hours per week recommended.

Develop and curate an inventory of new content and custom social media photography.

Track and report on data to inform strategy, paid social media advertising, and hashtag/keyword recommendations

Be an ambassador to the brand by responding to inquiries, compliments, and complaints.

Virtual Assistance - $60/hour

I'm honestly very fun to work with and I bet you'll get some good ideas and marketing tips out of me regardless. ;-)

Virtual assistance includes customer and client communications, email inbox management, and task flow management, travel coordination and event management, digital file organization and to-do list creation.

Alycia RockFebruary 24, 2021Comment

Questions for New Clients

Here are the questions I ask all my new clients to get the ball rolling when they’re considering hiring a remote marketing manager or small business marketing consultant.

Don’t forget customer acquisition isn't where the work ends. Creating a brand personality, and a world in which your products exist is the challenge!

These are questions I ask small businesses who are looking for marketing consulting, not necessarily the questions I’d use for graphic design or branding projects.

Section 1: who are you in business?

Brand and business questions:

What is the story behind your business?
What makes your business unique?
What do you love about what you do? What makes you excited to work every day?
Who serves you as an inspiration for your business?
Do you have an established mission statement?
If you had to describe your business or brand in 3 words, what words would you use?

Section 2: what are your business goals?

Marketing strategy questions:

What are your short and long-term goals as a business? Take some special time to answer this question.
What does the future hold for your business? What’s your vision? This may look like adding employees, working from home exclusively, or outsourcing some aspect of your business.
Have you worked with a digital marketing agency in the past? If so, what was your experience like? What was the outcome?
What messages does your business need to communicate?

Section 3: who are we talking to?

Customer development questions:

Who are your ideal clients/customers?
What do your customers think of you? What do you want them to think of you and your business?
Why are your customers looking for you? What problem do you solve for your customers?
How do people currently find your business? Do you intentionally drive traffic to your website via social media or SEO?
What actions do you typically want your audience to take after seeing your content?

Nailing down the answers to these questions can help small businesses make more money, attract customers or clients, and decide what kind of marketing they should focus on.

Let’s get started!

See how I can help

Alycia RockFebruary 24, 2021Comment

White Supremacy Culture as it Exists in Food Systems

Food system actors must understand how white supremacy culture narratives function to center whiteness across the food system.

Why should we care?

Well, a lot of reasons, but in short, white supremacy culture narratives create oppressive cultures in organizations and communities of white people who consider themselves allies, perpetuating white supremacy and feeding into systems that hold whiteness and white ideals as the default. White supremacy culture and whiteness are pervasive in our daily life, including within the food system. Consequently, policies. programs, and relationships fail to resonate with BIPOC communities, and systemic inequity is reinforced.

What are these white supremacy culture narratives?

In this specific conversation:

Individualism: the belief that people should be able to solve problems or accomplish goals on their own. In the food space, it is a focus on helping individuals who have fallen on hard times over structural issues contributing to food insecurity and hunger.

Paternalism: interfering in someone’s ability or opportunity to make decisions. It has the objective of improving welfare of individuals or communities yet involves making decisions without the consent of those concerned. In the food space, it is the belief that BIPOC communities cannot take care of themselves and need solutions prescribed to them.

Neoliberalism: a policy model which replaces entitlements with market-based solutions to social problems. In the food space, neoliberalism is rooted in American ideals of personal responsibility and hard work as the solution to hunger and that it is the responsibility of communities to care for those in need, not government.

Universalism: assumes that values held by whites are normal and widely shared, meaning everything is grounded in whitened cultural practices, and that the non-conforming must be educated on the ideals. In the food space, universalism means whiteness fuels and dominates the conversation on how and why the food system should be reformed, with organizations programming around those whitened assumptions.

These narratives help perpetuate the existing structures of power and privilege.

You know, the ones we’re trying to dismantle.

Unlearning these narratives and learning new ways to engage with each other is a daily practice and an opportunity to be compassionate, creative, and innovative!

Control, punishment, shame, and other destructive tendencies perpetuate oppressive, violent, and honestly life-threatening systems. White supremacy culture shows up on the daily but when we can recognize it, we can change it, and WE MUST ALSO change our reactions to it.

I recommend reading the recent post from @SHARONRANPARK (Instagram) titled “an invitation” for more information about engaging our creative capacity for internal transformation (a process that is generative, and in constant dialogue with reality and your personal social relationships!)

Additional white supremacy culture narratives can be found in the Showing Up for Racial Justice link in my bio. @JRRRROCK (Instagram) also has slides that provide an overview with antidotes!

Some specific examples from food systems work and their parent white supremacist narrative:

Figure 1: Intersection of White SupremacyCulture Narratives and Food System Narratives

If only they knew focuses on healthy food and cooking education instead of structural problems, such as inequities in food access.

Vote with your fork promotes the idea that individual consumption will signal a person’s values in the food system, while ignoring structural forces dictating who can access and afford food.

Communities can’t take care of themselves centers the idea that low-income and/or BIPOC communities need someone else to provide services and make decisions.

Failure to listen identifies an issue with organizations failing to engage with the community they serve and listen to what the members want and need.

Build it and they’ll come focuses on food retail approach as the solution to food issues and centers the conversation on food access as opposed to community-based ownership and wealth building strategies.

Pull yourself up by the bootstraps is rooted in the belief that people need to take personal responsibility and work harder to get out of hunger and poverty.

Focus on food charity emphasizes solutions to hunger that center on a charity approach rooted in the idea that hunger is an individual responsibility problem.

“Good food” vs. “bad food” involves white dominant culture determining what is considered ideal, ignoring other cultural insight.

What can we do?

Remember that paradigm shifts require individual commitment to understanding our failed systems in addition to demands for systemic change (and abolition, and radically loving communities, and the rejection of capitalism... but more on that later.)

Research how racism, anti-Blackness and white supremacy are built into the food system, AND in particular into your local community. Ask yourself, what inequities exist in the food system? How do these impact food insecurity and hunger rates in the United States? Whose labor and land was used to create the American agricultural system?

Pay attention to how whiteness has influenced your experiences in the food system. Think about things like: how many grocery stores do you have access to in your community and who owns them? How hard is it for you to find and afford culturally appropriate foods at the grocery stores you do have access to?

Understand that “colorblindness” is not real — society and the food system are not race-neutral spaces. Think through who holds the decision-making power in the food system and who benefits from the actions of those decision makers and institutions. Who most benefits from policy, programming, and capital decisions? Are these benefits equitably distributed? Why not?

Alison Conrad’s piece in its entirety can be read by following this link. It contains much more information than I can include here. I highly recommend reading it! You can also find content from her other citations, many of which are quoted in these graphics. If anyone has her Instagram handles, please pass them along - I couldn’t find her myself.

Alycia RockFebruary 8, 2021Comment

Pandemic Doodles

Alycia RockJuly 22, 2020Comment

Jane Doe vs. Donald Trump

Alycia RockJuly 22, 2020 Comment

weeks seven to fifteen?

Within a week of arriving in London I’ve settled in to a routine. Walks and coffee every morning, yoga in mid afternoon, a shower, settling in to work. The five weeks we spend in England passes in a flurry of normalcy peppered with travel. London feels something like home, but with more activities, more immediately available free events, more night buses. I love it there.

◓

Of course, instead of using our time in London wisely and taking advantage of its glitz, Jeremy and I take off to Basel, Switzerland, where we spend the better part of a week floating in the Rhine River and eating only what we can buy in the French store outside our apartment. Confined by how expensive the food is in restaurants, we make do with meat and cheese and chickpeas. Basel, on the far northwest tip of Switzerland, borders both Germany and France, and it’s an easy walk between the countries.

It’s hot - Europe’s first heatwave strikes while we’re visiting, making it easy to spend entire days lounging near the river and floating in its current. My favorite part is how polite everyone is, and how they appreciate quiet as much as I do. When golden hour strikes our apartment’s balcony, Jeremy lets me photograph him, photograph us. We huddle together on the concrete floor, or we spread out on the bed, and I listen to him laugh at his podcasts and he watches me read. It’s a fine country.

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The following weekend, we send ourselves to Manchester for Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm concert, then we’re in London for one night. A quick flight later and a bus later, and we are on the coast of Spain, my first time in Barcelona. It’s easier than France and easier than Switzerland - at least I can communicate. The days I have in this town are a gift.

Only thee topless men inhabit our illegal Air BnB, one of whom sleeps in the living room, so Jeremy and I pile atop each other in a double bed in a room with only a small window, and we’re glistening and feverish. The humidity caused by consistent storms keeps us damp. We frolic in the rain, literally lost in a hedge maze with laughing Spanish teenagers. One afternoon when it doesn’t drizzle, we lay on the beach and buy cheap (and surely alcohol-free) mojitos and watch such a variety of people cool down in the Mediterranean.

This is a place we can be ourselves, where everyone loves food and wine as much as we do, where eating for hours is normal and smiles are wide. Spain feels like an old friend.

◓

Days are passing like seconds and in the glow of London’s neon lights when we return, I am bliss. Before we know it, it’s time to leave. This time, leaving is a delight - my sister and Schu are coming, and we’re to spend two weeks together: working on Rooted, visiting Italy, singing, sharing our stories, being together.

When we step into Italy off the plane, everything about travel is changed. We nap every day until the sun gets lower, but it’s so hot it shines on me differently, poisoning my skin and burning our feet. Everything we do, we do covered in sweat. We’re all ready to leave Rome’s crowded streets when we go, but not before we circle the ancient sights at night, toss coins into the Trevi, pass bottles of wine between us, and eat pizza under golden streetlamps.

◓

I am not sure I can ever fully tell the story of my time in Italy, with all the beauty and triumph and foolishness it contained. How have I missed? A whole? Two months? Yes! Here I am - lazy, never quite fulfilled with writing, not even totally interested in the effort it requires. Some of it felt like falling into a story that wasn’t quite my own, someone’s life where they spend long summer days walking through the streets of Tuscan villages and making hairpin turns down a mountain in a five-speed sedan, and getting annoyed with friends then talking it out later over dinner and drinks, and singing Hamilton songs in the moonlight.

I feel something like the teenage boy writing on his Tumblr blog and putting ”flash” between each scene, which gives me the shivers. Flash. She’s the only girl I’ve ever met willing to sacrifice her happiness for my own. Flash. We’re in my bed, tumbling through white sheets. Flash. I’m falling. Flash. *Eyeroll emoji. Here’s my audition to be your one-dimensional trope of a traveling character.

◓

What does happen, though, is we keep our promises to each other, and we make it to Tuscany and then to Cinque Terre. We spend more days and nights together than ever before, each of them burned into my memory forever. I don’t even know what to detail. My sister and Schu are two people who Make It Happen, who survey the things about themselves others may find frustrating and study their own boundaries, who have intentions and goals and communication, and who are positive influences in my life.

And so, now, I will always once have been 27 and watching the sunset with my sister on a Cinque Terre cliff. I will always have been on a dark rocky beach listening to Schu talk about her family and her high school while the stars fall in the sky above us. I will always have been laughing at Jeremy with equal parts glee and sympathy as he flips his kayak trying to disembark on the cove. I will always have been bitten by 1,000 mosquitoes while lamenting our sunburns and swimming in the municipal pool and the Tuscan Candalla and the volcanic Bracciano lake and the Mediterranean. We will always be four blind people trusting each other to be our chaperones.

I know these three now. I see their irritation, their hunger, their goofy loving, their quiet mornings alone with coffee and their books. Their indignation and jokes and endless games. When I say I love you to Jeremy, Jessica and Schu, every night before bed, I mean it.

◓

To be honest, at this point, Rome is never ending. The heat will get worse before it gets better. After Jess and Schu leave, when it’s just Jeremy and I in the city, we fall into homesickness, and we have trouble keeping our heads above exhaustion. More and more it seems Rome is the one city we can’t have a comfortable word with, each day and each journey stretching on like the eternity the city is named for.

We take one final trip to Naples, one of the strangest and most unique cities I’ve visited. It’s unsettling, and beautiful, a city so teeming with its own life I will never hope to be included. We push each other and ourselves, losing our minds and hours to the broiling sidewalks and vertical climbs. Our flat is in the Spanish Quarter, with its wayside shrines and front door parties and mopeds filled to their brim with three or four riders, one of them often a child only in their underwear. It’s a blast, and it’s a maze.

We do take one path, a half-mile back alley that looks more like a concrete riverbed made of stairs. I thought I was having trouble already - hot, sore, thirsty, headache - but discomfort truly came when we encountered a dead and practically dehydrated cat, someone’s shoes on the side of the path, more trash and broken things than I could experience in my line of vision at once. Sometimes you just know when you’re not supposed to be somewhere. We’re panting and dripping by the time we burst onto a normal road again.

◓

It’s three in the morning where I sit now, on a mattress through which I can feel every single spring. The lights are off, but when they’re on, the LED lights cast a sickly green glow around the room. We leave them off as much as possible.

I leave Rome the day after tomorrow, heading to London once more. We will take a five-day drive to Edinburgh, where we will spend my last six weeks in Europe before moving to Montreal. I hope to write more often, to never leave this much time between posts, to journal or take notes daily, to keep up the photos. I will start uploading an album now, then sleep until tomorrow.

If you click these images, they will expand to a full size and proper aspect ratio, which I invite you to do.

Alycia RockAugust 16, 2019Comment

weeks five + six

I’m behind on everything, and I’m notorious for being late when writing is due. (But really, who is this writing for but myself?) I’m still working full time, and now living in a new apartment in London. I’m listening to the English rain and the English speak while I write this painfully short post — hopefully the photos will tell their own story, and there are a lot. I’m going to be brief and say my time in Paris was such a true delight, such a privilege, such an odd and memorable visit. I will carry it with me forever.

My life, like my writing, is jumpy and hard to track during the last weeks in the city of light. The pictures in my camera roll are fingerprints of the day, and they help me document each uniquely. From them, I remember we attempt socialization and share wine with strangers and coworkers, who sing together and tell stories of their engagements. I remember the mouse I saw run the length of a bookshelf in a new hotel where I was working. I remember lamenting that I cannot attend Alex’s fundraiser. I remember walking home from some afternoon stroll on one of my last days, snagging a set of colored disks from a children’s science set left atop a garbage can, and occasionally shooting through them for colored effects and experimentation. I remember using an old Diana camera and an entirely too expensive process to develop six precious photos on film.

◓

Jeremy turns 29 while we relish our last moments of Paris, while we keep telling each other stories of our lives — what we ate as kids and who we admired in high school and why — and while we watch a 0-0 women’s world cup game. I hope to delight him with a dinner at Chateaubriand, whose consommé is subtle and savory and my new favorite flavor, whose chef is one I know Jeremy admires. We drunkenly make memes about ourselves and send them to our closest friends. We can’t give the bartender the postcard we wrote Isaac, detailing the horrible cocktails he served us. Before dinner, we bathe in light and sound at L'Atelier des Lumières. On our last night, we find ourselves in a basement cocktail club whose influence no doubt contributes to our laughter when we get caught in a thunderstorm on our 3 a.m. walk home (the ordeal is less funny the next morning at 7 a.m. when I wake up drunk, my jacket and loafers still soaked, to finish packing and cleaning before I catch my train to London.)

Each day I attempt to dissolve the invisible barriers in my communication with myself. I take mindfulness very seriously. I try to cherish, cultivate, and ripen myself as a person, partner, friend. It may seem easy to the more confident among you, but for me, it’s an accomplishment.

A few notes from my phone too: I dreamed there was a lime scooter in the river and I had to pull it out in the rain. The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but with olive trees. A woman gluing herself against my back to sneak through the turnstyle, a gentle “merci beaucoup” before she is gone. The whole of the Sein itself feeling like a cool drink of water when the breeze blows. Being lured into coat check only to be charged €8 before we’re allowed into the bar. More corgis with tails.

◓

I want to take a quick sidetrack here to talk about pain. How do you know how your own face looks when you go through a new or surprising experience? If you do know, how did you find out? Did you act it in a mirror, or do you imagine it? If so, how do you know that’s truly what you look like while the thing is happening? Would an acted version of your face ever be similar enough to the real thing that someone observing you would say it’s the same as when the feeling is genuine and unpredictable?

So, then, how does my face look when I knock my fingers against a glass window, mistakenly reaching for a napkin through an invisible barrier while I’m crying at my new jaw specialists office? How do I laugh at myself through this and fumble to obtain the paper comfort that I need to dry my face with? Could I replicate this laughter to myself, the emotion tied to embarrassment tied to humility tied to gratitude?

Every minute of every day, and especially excruciating every months or so, my jaw cramps and locks in an impossible contraction that leaves this writer listless and hopeless with pain and the insurmountable challenge of self-advocacy. Yes, okay, relax. Yes, practice anxiety reduction. Yes, wear a mouth guard. Yes, do push-ups and see a chiropractor and tell your dentist. *eyeroll emoji* I spend hours researching dental tourism, veneers, braces, jaw surgery, splints, hot compress, ice, botox, muscle relaxers.

A few times in life, I’ve encountered a person who thins the space between the reality that I subscribe to and other, more mystic realities. I believe Dr. S—— may actually be a mind-reader, an elf, a fae-born changeling, a naturally-talented healer whose office is its own ring of flowers or mushrooms. Never so intentionally has my face and neck been touched, never with such interest have my teeth and bones been examined. She asks me a million gentle questions, her accent thick somewhere between native Romanian, years of French, and a bit of Spanish when the word fits best. At one point, I actually think she might kiss my head and I think I see her eyes glistening with tears for me. She reports way too many things that I never told her or mentioned, or maybe she’s an excellent con. She calls my mouth a map. She listens, she holds Jeremy’s hands with both of hers, and tells him it’s going to be okay. She strokes my forehead and smooths my hair and tells me I don’t deserve this. For the nearly three-hour consultation, she’s entirely focused on my well-being.

When I leave, she tells me she’s given me a gift and I am to think about it. On the way home, it’s raining when I stop at the farmers market and buy two chicken slouvaki in a haze similar to that of a really good workout, a really vivid therapy session, a really tough massage, really hot yoga. I don’t hear from her for weeks, until I’m nearly leaving Paris anyway. Then, she quotes me $2,000 for a split to live between my teeth. I feel lost and hopeless and pretty confused often when it comes to this situation. I don’t have much to say about it other than that. The investment is too great and I reluctantly turn away from a possible solution. Someday, I tell myself, I’ll be more confident in the treatment, and I’ll heal.

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All my days at the base of the Eiffel Tower and I still got emotional every time I saw it, by the way.

Alycia RockJune 19, 2019 Comment