Whether you’re a seasoned founder or just starting your entrepreneurial journey, our monthly meet-ups offer invaluable networking opportunities, expert business and personal growth insights, and a supportive community to help you thrive.

COCO monthly meetings include:

• Informal networking & conversations
• Workshops/presentations delivered by experts
• Powerful actions to support business and personal growth
• Masterminding to find solutions and ideas for any business challenge, small or big.

Build a Brand That Feels Like You

Speaker – Sarah Mannerings, Brand Coach

Join Sarah, brand coach and Marlow COCO Women Founders member for an honest look at what it takes to build a brand that actually feels like you.

Drawing on her own experience of building and rebuilding – her brand, Sarah will share why standard advice keeps you stuck if you have a history of putting other people’s needs first, what she changed about the strategy to get herself unstuck, and lead a short, hands-on exercise you can use to spot what might be holding your own brand back. Whether you’re just starting out or already established, you’ll leave with a clearer sense of what’s actually yours to build from.

What we’ll cover

1. Opening personal story – The moment at 17 that cemented a lifelong pattern of self-abandonment, told briefly. Sets up why this talk exists.

2. The pivot – why this matters for brand – Connecting the story to brand work: these patterns don’t stay in childhood, they show up directly in how you build.

3. Why the standard advice backfires – A worked example of how standard brand-building advice (“find your niche,” “start with the problem,” “find the gap”) actually keeps someone stuck if they’re prone to putting others’ needs first — the advice doesn’t just fail to help, it makes the stuckness worse. Lands on: this isn’t a you problem, it’s a strategy mismatch.

4. Live moment – a taste of the work – One guided exercise — Find Your Shadow: what you’ve been working hard to hide, “what are you afraid people will judge you for?” — so the room experiences the method rather than just hearing about it.

5. The reframe – Brand built on authenticity + alignment rather than performance. Why this is what actually makes a brand sustainable and easy to commit to.

6. Close & next step – What you walk away with today, and how you can go deeper depending on where you are: just starting out, further along but stuck, or already running a business that feels misaligned. All three paths lead to the same core deliverables (brand positioning, core message, purpose, values), with the option to go further into design direction.

About Sarah

Sarah spent over a decade in leadership roles at some of London’s top brand and design agencies, successfully building brands the industry-standard way — market gap first, target customer second, values built to fit. When she came to build her own brand, that same strategy didn’t just fail to help — it kept her stuck.

She’s since developed an inside-out approach to brand strategy: instead of starting from the market, she starts from who someone actually is. Most brand-strategy advice leads founders to perform for attention or shape-shift around an audience’s needs — often leaving them exhausted trying to sustain it, sometimes even before they’ve launched. Sarah shows founders how to build a brand that makes performance unnecessary by focusing on alignment instead. She now works with founders who have been holding themselves back, helping them build brands that feel safe to share and true enough that hiding — or performing — is no longer necessary, and they no longer need to leave themselves out of their brand.

FREE for Members| Visitors £15