When Usher Calls
Almost nobody in this field has done what Claire Machamer has done, at the scale she's done it, this many times.
Eleven website redesigns since 2004. A rebuild at UNCSA that won a CASE award, took a Webby nomination, and drove a 518% increase in prospective students raising their hands. A $65 million campaign that closed at $75 million with enrollment up 2.5%. She did it in publishing, in an academic health system, at two arts institutions, and she did it from a BFA in graphic design and an MS in IT management, including two years running UNCSA's entire technology division as its CTO.
Now she's the first SVP of communications and marketing at Berklee, where one brand system and one website have to hold six entities, three campuses, 42% international enrollment, and 90,000 alumni who each have a version of the logo they love. It's the most complicated project of her career and it launches this fall.
Mallory and Volt get into what she's learned about running things this big, why she goes looking for broken institutions on purpose, and the one part of this work that 22 years of better tooling has failed to make any easier.
🔑 What You'll Take Away
Why the biggest drag in a marketing shop is usually the cost nobody owns
What 11 website redesigns teach you about which parts of the work get faster and which hold still
Where AI stops being useful on a redesign, and why the bottleneck is institutional memory
How to rebuild wayfinding around what someone wants to learn rather than which campus they should pick
What changes when the brand system has to hold 6 identities without flattening any of them
Why a mentor's rule about taking the job that scares you produced a career nobody would draw on purpose