Campfire’s Lauren Stewart Named Ad Person of the Year
Recognized for her creative leadership in branding and design, Campfire & Co. co-founder Lauren Stewart was named Ad Person of the Year by the Richmond Ad Club
We are so honored and proud to announce that Campfire & Co. co-founder and creative director Lauren Stewart was named Ad Person of the Year at this year's Richmond Show!
The award recognizes Lauren's impact on Richmond's design landscape, from growing a small studio into one of the city's most recognized branding agencies, to leading the team behind the Diamond District neighborhood branding, one of Richmond's most ambitious public-private partnerships in decades. The brand she and the team created will shape the placemaking, signage, and identity of an entirely new 67-acre district in the center of the city.
What makes Lauren especially wonderful is hard to sum up in a paragraph, but we'll try. As Fan native who studied interior design at VCU, Lauren has always brought a perspective to this industry that's a little different. It’s tenacious, curious, and less interested in doing things the "right" way and more interested in doing them well.
She leads with generosity. She's shaped the growth of young designers, especially those with nontraditional backgrounds, because she knows firsthand that great work doesn't come from one kind of path. She obsesses over details, from the exact curve of a letterform or whether a sign is two inches too small, and that relentless care is what makes her an incredible creative director.
Lauren co-founded Campfire in 2012 with Christina Kern with a passion for adventure and finding your own path. That passion has turned into over a decade of work shaping brands and spaces people interact with every day, from the 100+ year legacy nonprofit rebrands like Shineforth to one of Richmond’s most beloved neighborhoods, with the Carytown brand and sign, to nationally recognized bars like The Jasper. Lauren’s influence can be seen and felt all throughout Richmond and beyond.
If you ask her about any of it, she'll point to the team first.
In her own words,
