Husband and wife team, Shawn and Katy Delehoy of Ouzel Creative are blending design, marketing and sustainability to create clear and cohesive branding for their clients with a distinctive flourish and style unlike any other. Ouzel Creative was established in January of 2022 and has been helping businesses nationwide with marketing, branding, websites and design work ever since. Lately, they’ve been ramping up their efforts closer to home here in Northern Colorado to better serve the place that they live in, work in, and love.
As artists and creatives forging their own path within the local landscape, Shawn and Katy understand what it’s like to be small business owners, and it’s from this knowledge that they aspire to utilize their natural gifts and strengths to help other local small business owners thrive. Their mission is to empower purpose-driven small businesses and organizations with strategic visual solutions. And they do this because they believe that remarkable people and brands are worthy of having the world take notice.
“We find that many small businesses are really struggling to juggle even just their daily tasks. So we like to partner with them as a design team that can take on their marketing, messaging, and branding and take that burden off their shoulders.”
Both Katy and Shawn grew up in Kansas but didn’t meet until they both converged upon Northern Colorado—Katy by way of Colorado State University and Shawn by way of his love for the mountains. Katy graduated from The Art Institute of Colorado in 2009 with a graphic design degree. She describes herself as an artist who has dabbled in an array of fine arts ever since she was a child including photography, pottery, and watercolor painting. When her mom asked her to design a digital graphic for her, she realized that graphic design was the perfect melding of all of her artistic talents and interests.
Shawn too, grew up with an appreciation and penchant for art and creativity. Always drawing, sketching, and doodling, during college he created elaborate chalk drawings for the bookstore where he worked. Chalk art turned into graphic design which blended with a mastery of coding and websites and master classes at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Eventually, with overlapping skill sets and stemming from their own loving and collaborative relationship, they decided to join forces, rebrand as a partnership, and launch Ouzel Creative.
When developing Ouzel Creative they knew that they wanted to embody and convey a number of integral concepts within their brand including sustainability, vibrancy, and resilience. An avid birdwatcher, Shawn immediately thought of the Ouzel. Also known as the American Dipper, the Ouzel is an aquatic songbird that lives on flowing rivers and is known to dip up and down as if dancing. It’s believed that they use this action to communicate above the noise of the rushing water, helping them stand out from the crowd.
Not only did Shawn and Katy’s venture parallel many of the qualities of the Ouzel, they also love a number of quotes from prolific naturalist and environmental philosopher, John Muir, who was so fond of the Ouzel that he devoted an entire chapter of his book “The Mountains of California” to beautifully and poetically describing its life and history.
"He is the mountain streams' own darling, the hummingbird of blooming waters, loving rocky ripple-slopes and sheets of foam as a bee loves flowers, as a lark loves sunshine and meadows. Among all the mountain birds, none has cheered me so much in my lonely wanderings, --none so unfailingly. For both in winter and summer he sings, sweetly, cheerily, independent alike of sunshine and of love, requiring no other inspiration than the stream on which he dwells. While water sings, so must he, in heat or cold, calm or storm, ever attuning his voice in sure accord; low in the drought of summer and the drought of winter, but never silent." - John Muir.
“We love the concept of the resilience of the Ouzel, but also of their vibrancy and singing above the noise of the river. It’s similar to how we help our clients rise above the noise,” Katy explains. “Not only that but they live locally on the Big Thompson River. There’s a nesting pair close to our house in River’s Edge National Area.”
At Ouzel Creative they keep sustainability top-of-mind, seeking to reduce their environmental impact and helping their clients do the same by being mindful of printed documents, digital data and energy usage, and helping to reduce digital footprints. They were also recently certified as a silver member of the Colorado Green Business Network. The CGBN is a voluntary program that encourages, supports, and rewards organizations that make the move toward the goal of true, operational sustainability. Ouzel Creative will be recognized on September 27th at the CGBN recognition event for their work in reducing resource use and implementing operational best practices in sustainability and environmental management.
Aside from their focus on sustainability, Katy recently acquired a StoryBrand Certification that truly sets their business apart from any other in the area. A unique framework and popular messaging tool, the StoryBrand Framework allows businesses to clarify their messaging, communicate value, connect with ideal customers and ultimately grow their business using a story BrandScript.
“A lot of small businesses have trouble getting clear on what they do. They have a hard time because they’re so close to it. What we do by utilizing the StoryBrand Framework is improve clarity and establish cohesion between branding and messaging,” Katy explains.
But most of all at Ouzel Creative, Katy and Shawn strive to have fun and make meaningful connections while helping local businesses with their branding, web design, and marketing. After both coping with and then improving chronic illnesses, they’ve hit the ground running and are happy to be in a much better place health-wise. Not a day goes by that they are not grateful and delighted by the fact that they are not only healthy, but get to be creative in a business that they own and love every day.
Shawn explains, “I love the creative aspect of the design work that we do. The variety of the different things we do every day - it’s fun and it’s a creative outlet. We put on our creative thinking caps every day and love it.”
But even moreso, the husband and wife duo behind Ouzel Creative loves to see the transformations of the businesses that they work with.
“It's really exciting to see the transformation. When we are able to take a website from kind of this jumbled mess to something that's really structured and clarified and cohesively conveys their message,” says Katy. “It’s like a style makeover and transformation that they can experience and see for themselves and it brings a lot of excitement and empowerment.”
To learn more about Ouzel Creative and see their work visit their website at www.ouzelcreative.studio.
Ouzel Creative is the husband and wife team of Shawn and Katy Delehoy located in Loveland serving Northern Colorado and beyond. Their passion is to use their creativity and design skills to help their clients uniquely communicate above the noise.
“We believe in empowering purpose-driven small businesses and organizations with strategic visual solutions because remarkable people and brands are worthy of having the world take notice.”
“It’s like a style makeover and transformation that they can experience and see for themselves and it brings a lot of excitement and empowerment.”