Brand & Consumer Marketing Apprentice/Fellow (Consumer Goods Venture)

The Short Version

You’ll work with an exceptional founder building a consumer venture from zero-to-one. Not refreshes. Not seasonal campaigns. A real company that needs to move from idea to cultural relevance, product-market fit, and shelf presence – fast.

What Liminal Is

A Founders’ Studio. We co-build with repeat founders, many of them unicorn founders, providing build expertise, capital, and unfair access from founding to Series B. We call ourselves a Founders’ Studio because “venture studio” undersells what we do and oversells what most of them deliver.

What This Role Actually Is

This role sits within a new consumer health and wellness venture being built alongside experienced operators and founders.
This is part strategist, part anthropologist, part cultural obsessive, and 100% executor. You should care deeply about why people buy what they buy, what makes certain products feel inevitable, and how taste, behavior, psychology, packaging, wellness, internet culture, and identity all collide inside modern consumer brands.
Consumer brands are cultural objects before they become businesses.
You’ll work directly alongside the founder and Liminal leadership helping define the strategic and cultural foundation of the venture:

• Consumer insight & behavior
• Brand identity & positioning
• Messaging, launch narratives & campaigns

All while rolling up your sleeves and doing whatever it takes to help the venture succeed.

The Work

Consumer and cultural insight: Research emerging behaviors across wellness, consumer goods, beauty, food, internet culture, retail, and lifestyle ecosystems. Understand not just what consumers buy, but why they emotionally attach to products.
Brand strategy and positioning: Help define audience personas, positioning frameworks, category whitespace, personality systems, and brand architecture. Build strategic foundations for a venture from scratch.
Narrative, messaging and campaigns: Develop brand narratives, messaging frameworks, tone of voice, launch language, product storytelling, and campaign thinking. Real writing. Clear thinking. Precision.
Product and market research: Study competitors obsessively – their packaging, pricing, formulation, retail strategy, customer psychology, community behavior, creator ecosystems, trend velocity
Creative direction support: Partner closely with designers and founders across visual identity, packaging, and brand expression. Speak design fluently enough to contribute with taste and precision.
Consumer testing and feedback loops: Support research studies, surveys, interviews, product testing, and consumer feedback synthesis as prototypes and formulations evolve.

Who You Are

Deep consumer curiosity: You’re obsessed with brands, products, trends, culture, and why people desire certain things. You probably overanalyze grocery stores, cafés, gyms, skincare aisles, and hotel minibars.
Exquisite taste: Not performative taste. Actual taste. The kind where you instinctively notice when something feels over-designed, trend-chasing, or emotionally hollow.
Strategic clarity: You can synthesize messy information into sharp insight. You can take scattered founder thoughts and distill them into coherent positioning.
Comfort with ambiguity: Blank-page environments energize you. No playbook. No legacy systems. No polished infrastructure. Just smart people building quickly.
Strong work ethic: This is not a clock-in-clock-out environment. Startups compress timelines. Sometimes that means intensity. You should want to be close to the action and do whatever it takes.
Contrarian instinct: Independent thinker. Curious. Opinionated. Comfortable debating ideas from first principles. Disagreeing yet committing.

Unicorn Points If

• You track emerging consumer brands recreationally
• You have strong visual or design instincts
• You’ve worked on editorial, creative strategy, fashion, beauty, wellness, or lifestyle projects
• You naturally spot cultural shifts before they become LinkedIn posts
• You have experience building communities, content, or internet-native brands

Apprenticeship or Fellowship, Not Internship

Twelve months. Meaningful stipend. Embedded directly within a live venture alongside experienced builders and founders. Not coffee runs. Not observation mode. Real ownership and exposure during the earliest stage of company-building.
If you’ve been looking for a way into startups, consumer brand-building, or venture creation from the ground floor – this is the door.