Without wanting to sound cheesy — because I really hate cheesy — Iconic has genuinely changed my life. When I started, I had a business that was doing well, but I wouldn’t say I really had a brand. I had a name, a fairly awful homemade logo and a product I knew there was a market for. I was getting bookings and the business was growing, but quite passively. I could see that it had so much more potential; I just didn’t really know how to unlock it. I went into Iconic thinking I needed to make my brand look better. What I hadn’t appreciated was how much of that work would actually start with understanding me. I remember getting to the work around your ‘Iconic Woman’ and thinking, how is this relevant? I just want my brand to be good and appealing. I’m not naturally someone who gravitates towards the emotional or self-development side of things, so thinking deeply about who I wanted to be, how I wanted to feel, how I wanted my life to look and what really mattered to me felt quite removed from building a better business. And yet, as Katie predicted I might, I literally cried doing that work. It makes you stop and take stock of not just your business, but your whole life. And once you start understanding what you actually want — rather than what you think your brand is supposed to look like, or what you think other people want from you — everything else starts to make so much more sense. Before Iconic, I didn’t really see myself as an artist or even particularly as a creative. I felt like a bit of an imposter in the industry. I thought I was someone who took inspiration from other people’s work rather than someone capable of being the inspiration. It’s taken time, but I now genuinely recognise that what I’m creating is different. I have my own creative voice. I’m coming up with designs, processes and ideas that are completely my own, and I’ve realised that I actually do have that innate artistry in me that I didn’t believe I had before. The structured process was a huge part of that for me. Each piece of work builds on what came before it. Rather than jumping straight to the tempting bits — a new logo, new imagery, new colours — you’re creating the foundations first. By the time you get to the outward-facing parts of the brand, you understand why they should look and feel the way they do. And that work doesn’t disappear once you’ve completed an exercise. It’s become completely ingrained in how I run my business: how I communicate, what I create, what I show, the opportunities I accept and the ones I turn down. I now have a very strong instinct for what is and isn’t right for Fleur de la Couture. The transformation in the business has been enormous. I’m now attracting the clients and budgets I wanted and working at venues that, when I started Iconic, were on my bucket list. I’ve learned to invest in creating imagery at the level I want to work at, rather than simply showing the level I’ve already worked at. I’ve become much more selective about the projects I take on and much more confident in the value of what I offer. Most importantly, my brand finally feels right. I’ve also realised that people aren’t only buying my flowers or my designs; they’re buying into me. I’m still learning to be more visible and I’m definitely not someone who naturally loves being in front of a camera, but I’m becoming much more comfortable with the idea that I don’t need to appeal to everybody. The right clients need to see who I actually am. When I started Iconic, I was a senior doctor running my floristry business alongside my medical career. I liked the idea of one day doing the business full-time, but I couldn’t really see how I would ever get there. I assumed medicine would remain my career and floristry would continue alongside it. Today, I’ve stepped away from medicine and Fleur de la Couture is my career. There were personal circumstances that also influenced that decision, but Iconic gave me the tools to transform the business — and, probably more importantly, transformed the way I saw its potential and my own ability to realise it. It put the business in a position where choosing it no longer felt like an irresponsible leap into the unknown. It felt exciting. I think that’s what makes this work so valuable. This isn’t a quick fix or a surface-level rebrand. It isn’t ‘choose five brand words, pick some colours and get a better logo’. It goes much deeper into who you are, what you want and what you want your business and your life to become. And because those are the foundations you’re building on, the changes feel permanent. If I hadn’t done Iconic, I think my business would probably still be ticking along. It might have continued to grow slowly, but I don’t think I would have understood what it could become — or what I was capable of creating. So, as much as I hate saying anything that sounds overly dramatic, Iconic really has changed my life. It gave me the tools to build the brand I knew was somewhere inside this business, but also the confidence to realise that I was the person capable of building it.