We started Thoughtfully Ambitious because we kept seeing talented people in the messy middle of growing their business feeling so overwhelmed, and so underrepresented by their own presence online. Not because their work wasn't good — it was always good. Because no one had helped them build something that actually felt like them, and that was designed around their life, their capacity, and the way they wanted to work.
We've both been in the messy middle of business, we've dealt with the emotional rollercoaster of real campaigns, real client fires, with real money on the line. Going through everything we've dealt with helped us refine our method, our frameworks, and gave us zero patience for fixing the wrong thing.
Here's how we got here.
We built the Studio
we wished existed.
about the studio
Not in a precocious-future-marketer way. In a why-is-this-one-working-on-me-and-that-one-isn't way...
- Why did one ad make a thing feel essential while another made the same thing feel pushy?
- Why did this campaign run for years and that one disappear after a month?
- Why is “Start the Car!” by IKEA so f*cking timeless?!
I was doing pattern recognition on conversion psychology before I'd ever heard the phrase. Nobody told me that's what I was doing or that it's a real life job (Mad Men wasn't a thing yet, and Uncle Jesse was the most notable ad exec I knew thanks to Full House).
I did what I was supposed to do, for a while.
Went to school, held a career in business administration and operations, dabbled with side hustles and explored things like retail management, studio photography, and going from contract to contract collecting skills. Got seriously bored along the way, but this was adulting, sooo it was supposed to feel like this, right?
I'd always been the person who saw what was actually broken and said so. Someone finally said I should explore marketing…it fit my brain: creativity and strategy, all day, everyday? Sign me up!
So I shifted into marketing in 2009 and finally let the instinct work.
Went back to school for a business degree, flipped into marketing work, agency side. High-stakes pressure working with big accounts, with real money and reputations on the line. Deadlines that didn't move for anyone.
12 years in I’d managed $105M+ in ad spend between contract agency work and my business. I’d become the person they called when something was on fire at midnight and had to be fixed before morning.
I leveraged my diagnostic skills and curiosity to figure out how to fix what teams of people couldn’t fix. Conditions didn’t allow for guessing, I needed methodology and structure to find the leak, to find the gaps, and to fix them.
Then in 2022, I gave myself room to learn.
Terrica and I closed the ad agency we'd been running together since 2019. I'd burned out from running ads 24/7/365, and wanted to own the copywriting and messaging work I'd been doing inside accounts for a decade. I wanted to study the psychology underneath buyer behaviour more seriously.
And I was afraid to say all this out loud! I’d built a reputation for being an ad expert and people thought it was nuts to walk away from that. They didn’t get that I wanted more than burnout.
So, on the DL I went and got a mindset coaching certification, then kept going. Read more psychology than most copywriters or marketers will read in their careers. Studied consumer decision-making, business owner emotional patterns, the things that show up in copy that nobody talks about because they live underneath the buying decision.
That detour made me a meaningfully better copywriter and strategist. The work I do now hits emotional layers most strategists never reach.
It's often way more impactful too!
I've been diagnosing this stuff since I was a kid.
Vanessa Shepherd
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Vanessa Shepherd
Aquarius, Generator, Lover of Vintage meets modern vibes
She made the shift into brand design and strategy because she saw that gap everywhere and couldn't stop wanting to fix it.
She started a stationery design studio with a business partner. That partnership ended badly. The kind of badly that would make most people walk away from the whole thing and go back to something safer. She didn't.
She built her own brand design and strategy practice instead. And she built it around something most designers aren't thinking about.
A magnetic brand isn't about aesthetics. It's about a deep, honest understanding of the people it's built for, and an operational foundation that can actually support the experience the brand promises.
Fifteen years, 125+ clients, 75+ brands, and a master's in human services later, Terrica brings a diagnostic lens to brand work that most strategists can't replicate.
The question she's always asking is what the brand experience actually feels like to the person on the other side of it, where it breaks down operationally, and what's quietly costing you the clients who should have been a perfect fit.
She's currently serving as creative director and operations manager for Natalie Bullen's Unapologetic Wealth, while bringing the Studio into projects where the diagnostic pairing is exactly what's needed.
A self-described creative renegade hailing from Atlanta, with a whole lot of heart and wit that genuinely won't quit.
She got burned, rebuilt anyway, and came back sharper.
terrica strozier
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Terrica Strozier
Atlanta born & raised, Lover of trap music, nostalgic tees & sneaks, and loves to cook scratch-made from the heart
An online community.
A retreat in Phoenix.
One conversation that went all night.
We met in 2016 in an online community for female entrepreneurs. Two women who'd both come up through business administration, made the same career pivot into marketing and brand strategy, and ended up in the same digital corner of the internet asking the same questions about why so much industry advice wasn't actually working.
We finally met in person at a retreat in Phoenix. Stayed up all night talking. The kind of conversation where you keep thinking it should probably wrap up and then one of you says something that opens a whole new thread and suddenly it's 3am and neither of you cares.
We started collaborating on projects in 2019. By early 2020 we'd joined forces to run an ad agency together. We closed the agency in 2022 for the cleanest possible reason. Vanessa burned out. Terrica was being recruited to lead creative direction at Unapologetic Wealth. We'd both hit natural inflection points at the same time and we gave ourselves permission to take them.
We kept working together anyway. Because when two people's diagnostic lenses fit this well, you don't walk away from that just because the business structure changed.
We've worked on campaigns at scale together. Managed brand accounts under real pressure together. Built things and rebuilt things that weren't working together. Our husbands joke that we're always talking to each other. Fair. That's what a decade of cross-border visits, marathon strategy calls, and building real things together does.
HOW WE FOUND EACH OTHER
Twelve years of friendship. Six years of professional partnership. A decade of cross-border visits and marathon strategy calls. That's the foundation the Studio is built on.
Most of these we don't have to talk about with each other. They're the through-lines we both walked into the partnership already holding.
→ Diagnose before you prescribe. Always. No exceptions. Every fix we build starts with finding the real problem first. We say this so often it should be the Studio's national anthem.
→ Execution without diagnosis is expensive guessing. We've watched real money get spent on the wrong fix because nobody slowed down to find the actual problem first. We don't do that. Even when the client is in a hurry. Especially when the client is in a hurry.
→ Selling without sleaze is not only possible, it's the only kind worth doing. Good positioning and honest copy outperform manipulation. Every time. We have decades of data on this. There's no version of this where bro-marketing tactics produce better long-term results than telling the truth well.
→ You can sound like yourself and still sell. These aren't in conflict. The copy that works best for you is almost always the copy that's actually yours. The version that sounds like a sales page wrote a sales page is the version that converts worst.
→ Order of operations is the work. Most fixes fail because they happen in the wrong sequence. The right fix in the wrong order is still the wrong move. Knowing what to fix first is the part most strategists don't deliver. We do.
→ The diagnostic eye gets sharper with time, not duller. Twenty-five years of doing this means we've seen most of the patterns. That's not a flex. That's the reason a senior strategist costs more than a freelancer with two years under her belt. The pattern library is the asset.
→ Confidentiality is a real promise, not a checkbox. Nothing you share with us shows up anywhere else without your written permission. Not in our content, not in our case studies, not in conversations with other clients. The default is full discretion. That's why we can be trusted with the work that matters most.
NON-NEGOTIABLES
What We Believe.
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→ You're running an established business with services, products, or offers that aren't doing what they should be doing right now
→ You've tweaked the copy, changed the price, redone the offer, hired someone, and things still aren't clicking the way they should
→ You know your offer is good. You just can't figure out why it's not reaching the right people in the right way
→ You're tired of being handed frameworks to work through alone before anyone has actually found the real problem
→ You want someone to look at the whole picture (copy, offer, messaging, data, brand experience) and tell you the truth about what's wrong
→ You're done guessing. You want a diagnosis, a fix plan, and the confidence to act on it in the right order
→ You want to work with a team that's genuinely invested in your results, not just your deliverables
If you're nodding at more than three of these, you're in the right place. We built the Studio for you.
You're in the right place if...
#C9C1E8
Lilac
#234A73
Captain Navy
- Mel Robbins
- Rachel Hollis / Hollis Co.
- Pre-K Pages
- The Ladies Edge
- Heart Behind Hustle
- Bossbabe
- I Heart My Life
- Pop Your Pup
- Advance Your Reach
- Splendidly Curious
- The Independent Clinician
- Credit Repair Cloud
- Western Canadian Lottery Corp.
- Edmonton International Airport
- Pete Vargas
- Elections Alberta
- High Achievers Media
- Jen Kem
- Nicole Diedrich / Ads Queen
- Zach Spuckler / Heart Soul Hustle
- Natalie Bullen / Unapologetic Wealth
- Misiyo Candle Co.
- Ang Hill Fashion
- Zoe Linda / Referral Pie
- City of Edmonton
- Edmonton Transit
- Government of Alberta
- Campbell Scientific
- AutoTrader
- DDB Edmonton
- TELUS
- University of Alberta
- 3E Public Relations
- Pique Coaching
- Rachel Rodgers / Hello Seven Co
- Pierce Media
- Luna Rosa Botanicals
- Beth Conroy
- Donaji Meija
- Dr. Adair
- Wellspired / Jen Wright
- Tami Santini
- Sally Z / Be Moved
- Her Wealth Coach
- Hirsh Marketing
- Lacey Cribb / Lacey Implements
- Nequosha Anderson
- Bayou Brand House
- Terrica Strozier Design
- Keshani Kurera
Some brands we've worked with while subcontracting for marketing agencies:
Some of the brands we've worked with...
launches supported
375+
brands & campaigns built
500+
client revenue generated
$304.7M
combined expertise
40+ yrs
Real Experience. Real Receipts.
Numbers don't make a Studio. The diagnostic eye does.
The numbers are the receipts that the eye works.
— Studio Client, Designer & Consultant
Vanessa helped me articulate my offer in a way I never could on my own. Now my copy sounds like me, sells like magic, and I finally have a strategy that doesn’t feel exhausting. The whole process felt thoughtful, clear, and so aligned.
Let's find out what's actually broken.
The Full Read is where most of our clients start. One full sales path through your business, end-to-end. Two diagnostic brains. A written diagnostic, a priority action list, and a debrief call to walk through it together.
$1,497. One-time. Delivered in 7–10 business days.
READY TO STOP GUESSING?
The Copy & Strategy Studio is a boutique conversion and brand strategy team for service and digital product businesses with something that isn't quite landing — and the copywriters and agencies who serve them.
Diagnosis first. Execution second. Built to fix the right thing in the right order, every time.