How I Built a Brand Voice Guide for a Kickstarter-Funded Fire Pit Brand — and Fixed the Systemic Copy Problems Underneath

Brand Strategy · Copywriting · Outdoor Industry

I met the founder of PACKFIRE at a five-minute speed date.

That’s literally what they called it, New Gear Speed Dating, at Outdoor Media Summit in Durango, Colorado last year. Five minutes per brand, shared with two other consultants or creators. The founder was talking about a disconnect with their agency. The copy kept missing the mark.

I knew exactly what the problem was before he finished the sentence.

I’ve seen this with outdoor brands at every stage of growth. You hire an agency, you hand them your vibe and your color palette, and you hope they figure out the rest. Sometimes they do. More often — especially when the writing team doesn’t understand American outdoor culture, what dispersed camping means, or why someone would describe their fire setup as “dialed in” — they don’t.

The deliverables come back technically correct and culturally off. The team gives feedback. The agency adjusts. The next round is off, too. Everyone’s frustrated and nobody knows why.

Why: there’s no brand voice guide. Without one, every agency, every freelancer, every influencer is guessing.

And if the internal team hasn’t aligned on strategy first, the agency is guessing based on mixed signals from five people who don’t always agree. At that point you’re not paying for good copy. You’re paying for expensive guessing.

I gave the founder my card. Followed up twice. And a few months later, when they hired their first full-time marketing director and brought on a new agency, they hired me as their first freelance hire to build the foundational document that should’ve existed from day one.

The brand

PACKFIRE is a portable fold-flat wood-burning fire pit that packs into a carrying case with backpack straps. It keeps the fire contained, keeps your truck clean, and fits in spaces other stoves can’t touch.

It launched on Kickstarter, funded in under two hours, and landed press in Outside, Popular Mechanics, and Gear Junkie before most of the outdoor industry had heard of it. It’s a great product that already has serious momentum. But the copy was consistently undercutting both.

From wrong vehicle references appeared on the homepage — not the vehicles any overlander drives or aspires to drive. To soft, suburban, ambient language showed up in brand copy — a brand like this needs to stay miles away from that. And a headline framing the product as something you’d hike with had been running for months — a line their Marketing Manager said she’d been trying to kill.

The portability story was getting miscommunicated, too. Because the carrying case has backpack straps and the copy and images showed it on the back of a hiker, some buyers assumed the product was meant for longer distance hiking. Those people then left disappointed reviews when a 35-pound fire pit turned out not to be great for a multi-mile carry. The product is car-to-beach, car-to-camp, but the copy kept implying something else.

And underneath all of it: five stakeholders with real disagreements on positioning, a new agency coming in, freelancers and influencers in the mix, and no single document that said this is who we are and this is how we talk.

What a brand voice guide actually does

A brand voice guide is the document that makes every subsequent dollar spent on marketing work the way it’s supposed to. It’s not a list of adjectives. It’s not a style sheet. It’s the strategic language infrastructure your team, your agencies, your freelancers, and your content partners all pull from. It makes everything you publish sound like it came from the same source of truth, the same brand, because it did.

For a lean ecomm team doing a lot of contract work, it’s also the thing that stops you from spending thousands on ads that miss, hundreds of hours revising deliverables that don’t sound right, and years trying to re-explain your brand identity to every new hire.

I’ve had brands balk at the intake process — 75 minutes between forms and a kickoff call can feel like a lot when you’re already underwater. But that 75 minutes is what prevents the expensive guessing. Every brand that pushed through said the same thing afterward: “I can’t believe we didn’t have this before.”

PACKFIRE was ready. We kicked off the last week of March, and I delivered the final version on May 9th.

The research

Before writing a word, I needed to understand who the target ideal customer persona actually is and how they really talk.

I pulled community vocabulary directly from Reddit threads across their ICP list: r/overlanding, r/vandwellers, r/vanlife, r/camping, r/hunting, and r/fishing. I reviewed customer registration data, Kickstarter survey responses, Amazon and Kickstarter reviews, and press coverage.

And I ran a kickoff call with the full stakeholder team of five specifically to surface the contradictions in their intake forms — different people had listed different use cases, different audiences, different personalities for the brand — and get everyone aligned before a single word of the guide was written.

I have real firsthand experience in the van life and overlanding worlds, and enough proximity to the hunting and fishing communities to understand the culture without pretending I’m in it. That matters when you’re writing for brands in these spaces. You can’t fake knowing what a rig is, or why “dialed in” is a compliment, or why certain community vocabulary should stay in the audience’s mouth and out of the brand’s copy. The audience clocks it immediately — and they’ll say so loudly on the internet.

The calls I had to make

The hardest strategic decisions weren’t the ones with obvious right answers. They were the ones that required the client to commit to something uncomfortable.

Retiring “backpack.” The word is on the product and in all their existing copy. I couldn’t eliminate it entirely, but I reframed what it signals. The carrying case is a carry system — it’s how you get the fire pit from your truck to the beach. It has it’s own kickstand to make it even easier to use. It’s more than a “backpack.” In copy, it belongs to form factor and vehicle context, not the product name. “Fits in the rig. Sets up in 15 seconds.” That’s the story.

Reframing portability. “Portable” is what every competitor claims. It’s flat, forgettable, and differentiates nothing. The real story is the benefits of the form factor: this is the fire pit that fits where the others don’t, that lives inside the truck instead of strapped to the outside, that you actually bring instead of leaving it at home. That’s a more specific, more defensible claim and it speaks directly to the customers who were already arriving as a trade-up from bulkier alternatives.

Taking cozy off the table (mostly). The marketing director pushed back on this one initially. She didn’t want to rule out the backyard customer or the person who genuinely wants to unwind by a fire. And she’s right that those customers exist. The registration data confirms it. But the strongest brands don’t try to be everything at once. My call: cozy is fine for influencers and affiliates in their own voice. It’s not for owned copy. In owned copy, the fire is earned, not ambient. When I walked through that distinction on the feedback call, it clicked immediately. Committing to a niche is scary until you see it work.

No more general audience, backyard-first marketing. The at-home buyer is real and buying. But if you write to them first, you lose the core audience. If you write to the overlander, the backyard buyer still buys because they want to be the kind of person who takes a fire pit to the beach. The aspiration does the work.

Fire safety guidelines. This one wasn’t optional. It was a liability issue. PACKFIRE burns wood. Under Stage 1 or Stage 2 fire restrictions, a wood-burning fire pit is prohibited regardless of combustion efficiency. “Smokeless” does not exempt it. If any piece of content ever implied otherwise, the brand would have a real and immediate problem on its hands. I treated this section with the same directness and weight as the rest of the guide, because it needed it.

The deliverable

An eight-tab brand voice guide (the most comprehensive one I’ve built to date) covering:

• Voice overview, emotional target, and brand beliefs
• Customer profiles with behavioral and cultural nuance
• Voice attributes with yes/no definitions and real examples
• Community vocabulary — what to use, what to use carefully, what to never say
• Channel-by-channel copy direction across website, email, social, Amazon, and packaging
• A do/don’t example library for every major platform
• Boilerplate copy: taglines, about us, social bios, and modular feature callout language
• Product and safety guidelines built specifically for writers and content partners

Every section was designed to work independently. A social media manager can open the channel guide and get what they need without reading the whole document. A new agency can pick it up on day one and produce on-brand work without a single orientation call. Each section has in-links to other relevant sections so you never have to read the whole document.

This is bigger and more thorough than the brand voice work I’ve done before, which has typically been scoped to a specific service like PDPs or SEO content. This was the whole brand, end to end, built to be handed to anyone and trusted completely.

What the team said

The guide went to all five stakeholders with a comment deadline. The feedback was extensive, engaged, and positive across the board — the kind where people are clearly reading closely and already thinking about how they’ll use it.

Then there was the check-in call — just me and the marketing lead, 20 minutes, after the first round of comments came in. We got aligned on the open items, talked through the strategic calls, and at the end he said:

“This is so much better. I think with the new agency and this, we’re heading in a good direction.”

For the first time, the team had one document to point to. One place where the answer to “how are we supposed to say this?”

What this project is really an example of

This project is what happens when a lean outdoor ecomm brand has been operating without foundational language infrastructure and finally builds it.

The copy problems were the symptom. The root problem was that there was no single source of truth. No document the team, the agency, the freelancers, and the influencers could all pull from. Without that, every piece of content is a negotiation. Every agency deliverable is a guess. Every new hire starts from zero.

If you’re running a small outdoor brand with 5 to 20 people, contract workers, a new agency, or just a team that’s been winging the voice… this is probably familiar.

Not because you’re doing anything wrong. Because nobody handed you this document when you launched, and you’ve been managing without it ever since.

A brand voice guide at this stage isn’t a luxury. It makes every subsequent dollar you spend on marketing actually work.

Interested in building yours?

Deliverable: 8-page Brand Voice & Messaging System  ·  Client: PACKFIRE (outdoor ecomm, portable fire pits)  ·  Timeline: March – May 2026  ·  Industry: Outdoor / Adventure