DBD ORIGIN STORY
FROM CREATIVE TO BRAND ARCHITECTURE
HOW IT ALL STARTED
The summer before college, Donellia was already interning inside a marketing firm in Chicago — learning strategy before she ever sat in a classroom that taught it. When college started, she wanted to build something of her own. Without the capital to launch the clothing brand she had envisioned, she built the infrastructure herself first — teaching herself web design, brand design, and applying everything she had learned about marketing strategy to bring it to life. While building it, she was working retail, mentoring other students, and was promoted to run the retail store — a role she had to decline because of school. Other entrepreneurs started noticing what she was building and asking for help with their own brands. That’s when Designs By Donellia stopped being a personal solution and became a practice.
PIVOTING FROM DESIGN TO STRATEGY
After graduating early in 2019 with a degree in Textile Apparel Management (Marketing & Merchandising), Donellia had every intention of scaling her clothing store. But when the pandemic hit in 2020, the business
had to temporarily close. Still determined, she worked on relaunching Shop The Impact while simultaneously seeking funding for three years. During this time, she wrote an extensive 60-page business plan, detailing every aspect of the brand’s strategy.
When she connected with Small Business Administration (SBA) advisors in Chicago, they were impressed—stating that they had never worked with a client whose plan was so thorough, strategic, and well-executed. While the SBA provided some guidance, the strategies Donellia developed were already highly refined and deeply researched.While navigating the challenges of securing funding, Donellia continued taking on freelance projects to fund her vision. This hands-on experience deepened her expertise in brand development, marketing, and business planning.
Her knowledge and execution skills were so strong that she later earned a Career & Technical Educators (CTE) License, allowing her to teach entrepreneurship, marketing, graphic design, and web design in Chicago Public Schools and across the state of Illinois.
THE TURNING POINT - GOING ALL IN
While Donellia had the credentials to teach, she never pursued it full-time. Instead, she focused on growing her marketing experience—consulting, managing social media, and working in digital roles before becoming the Branding Director at a real estate company. That’s where she began enhancing the company internal brand architecture & training realtors on how to build personal brands, laying the foundation for the work she does today.
But something felt off. The deeper she worked with professionals and founders, the more she recognized the same pattern: brands that looked credible on the surface had no structural logic underneath. That’s when it clicked.
For years, Donellia had been quietly mastering branding, marketing, and business strategy — she just hadn’t yet positioned herself as the person who solved it specifically. That changed. DBD stopped being a design studio and became what it had always been: a brand architecture practice.
Today DBD operates as a clarity-first brand advisory — working with founders at every stage of building, and with scaling teams and corporations, to construct and assess the structural framework that makes brands operate with precision.