Strategic thinking.
Start to finish.
I’m Jeff Sugarman — brand strategist, designer, and the person who leads every engagement at Ora.
I started Ora in 2015 after a decade at Staples, where I led brand and packaging strategy for their private label division. Before that, I spent 14 years building brands across consumer products, retail, and services.
What that experience taught me — more than any specific skill — was a way of seeing. Most designers look at a brief and think about aesthetics. I look at a brief and think about the business problem underneath it. Ten years inside a Fortune 500 company — sitting in product strategy meetings, mapping brand architecture across thousands of SKUs, learning how a packaging decision made today creates problems two years from now — changes the way you see everything.
What I Learned at Staples
When I joined in 2004, Staples had given their private label division a new mandate: stop competing on price and build a real brand. A major design consultancy had created the visual system. The problem was that nobody knew how to implement it across a portfolio spanning hundreds of wildly different product types.
I was hired to bridge that gap.
What started as a one-person implementation job evolved into something much larger. I built a team and redesigned how projects were run — clarifying roles across brand management, product sourcing, production, and creative so that technical details were conveyed correctly, decisions were made by the right people, and the design team always knew who to turn to with questions. Eventually, I became Creative Director overseeing all Staples brand products and services — a 24-person multidisciplinary team supporting multiple business units.
But the most important thing I learned at Staples wasn’t about design. It was about how decisions actually get made inside a business — and how design fits into that picture.
Early on, I started attending product strategy meetings that designers weren’t typically invited to. Category planning. Assortment decisions. Pricing. Procurement. Customer research. I wasn’t there to present creative work. I was there to understand the business decisions that would shape what we designed and why.
What I found was that design decisions and business decisions were constantly affecting each other — but almost nobody was managing that relationship deliberately. A product manager would plan a line extension two years out without telling the design team, so packaging decisions made today would create problems later. A buyer would negotiate a cost reduction that changed the substrate, and the design team would find out when the first samples came back wrong. Pricing strategy would shift a product into a different competitive tier, but the packaging still looked like it belonged in the old one.
I learned to ask business questions before picking up a pencil. What is this product’s role in the portfolio? Who is the customer, and what are they comparing this to on the shelf? What does this need to communicate in the three seconds before someone picks it up or walks past it? What are the production constraints, and how do they affect what’s actually possible? What’s coming in the product roadmap that the packaging needs to accommodate?
Those questions changed the quality of the work — not because they made the design more clever, but because they made it more accurate. Design that’s built on a clear understanding of the business problem it’s solving is more effective than design that’s just well-crafted.
I also learned how profoundly packaging shapes the way customers feel about a product — often before they’ve ever used it. When we rebuilt the Staples private label brand architecture, we organized thousands of SKUs into a coherent good/better/best framework with distinct visual tiers. The redesign convinced 89% of customers that the new packaging contained a higher-quality product — before anything inside the box had changed. The product was identical. The perception wasn’t. That’s not a trick. That’s what it looks like when design and strategy are working together correctly.
The other thing Staples taught me was the value of systems thinking. A brand isn’t a logo — it’s a set of decisions that have to hold together across every context a customer encounters it. A system that works beautifully on packaging but falls apart on a website, a social media post, or a retail display isn’t a brand system. Creating something that scales — across product categories, formats, markets, and time — requires a level of strategic rigor that most design projects never get.
That rigor is what I bring to every client engagement at Ora.
Some of what we delivered during my time at Staples:
A brand architecture organizing thousands of SKUs into a coherent good/better/best framework — the redesign convinced 89% of customers that the new packaging contained a higher-quality product
The Arc customizable notebook system — from naming and brand story through packaging, retail displays, and digital content — which grew into a $10 million product line
Copy & Print revenue growth of 14% — $27 million — supported by campaigns our team conceived and executed
Japan marked Staples’ first entry into a market as a product manufacturer rather than a retailer — a brand launch I led from concept through execution
I also earned the Staples Chairman’s Award — the company’s highest recognition for exceptional contribution.
How I Work
Most designers present options and wait for feedback. Their understanding of your business is limited to what you put in a brief. That’s not how I work — and honestly, it’s not how good brand decisions get made.
Before I propose a scope of work, I do a high-level assessment of your business. I want to understand your competitive position, your growth trajectory, and whether your current brand is helping or hurting you. This isn’t busywork — it helps me evaluate whether I can move the needle for you, and it shapes the work I propose.
Once we agree on a scope, we start with a detailed kickoff conversation. I want to understand what’s been tried before, what worked and what didn’t, how you make decisions, and what success looks like for your business. This conversation sets up the first presentation.
The first presentation is intentionally wide. I show three to five concepts that are deliberately different from one another — sometimes uncomfortably so. I do this because most people struggle to articulate what they like or don’t like about a design in the abstract. Vague words like “bold” or “modern” mean different things to different people. By showing a wide range of directions, we move past those conversations quickly and get to something specific.
From there, the process narrows progressively — more detail applied to fewer directions. I always test concepts across the specific applications you use: different formats, different contexts, different audiences. A brand system that only works on packaging but falls apart on a website, a social media post, or a retail display isn’t a brand system.
At every stage, I walk you through my thinking. Every creative decision connects back to your strategy. We discuss tradeoffs openly. The goal isn’t to sell you on a direction — it’s to help you develop a clear point of view on your own brand.
By the time I’m writing your brand guide, it’s mostly an encapsulation of the conversations we’ve already had. Nothing in it should surprise you — it reflects decisions we made together along the way.
What This Means for You
You get one senior person, accountable from brief to launch. There’s no chain of handoffs where the strategic thinking gets diluted before it reaches the work. The person who understands your business is the person doing the work.
If that sounds like what you’ve been looking for, the best place to start is the Packaging That Sells self-assessment. It takes a few minutes and will give you an honest picture of where your brand stands — before we ever talk.
Or if you’d rather just talk, book a free intro call.
“Jeff has been supporting our brand strategy since the DLC incorporated as an independent nonprofit. He has been instrumental in translating our mission into design and guiding us so that our tools and messaging are clear and accessible to our users. He is strategic, organized and a pleasure to work with.”
— Christina Halfpenny, Executive Director & CEO, DesignLights Consortium
Capabilities
Brand Strategy
Product Naming
Logo Design
Package Design
Websites & Landing Pages
Digital & Social Extensions
Sales Collateral
Brand Guidelines