Meet Jess Abdulnour of The BrandNué Agency

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jess Abdulnour.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I sold my first engagement ring at seven years old. The price was $7,000. By then, I already had years of behind-the-counter experience at my family’s jewelry store.

After my parents immigrated to the United States, they opened Jewelry Design Gallery in Seal Beach, California. The store has been part of the community for 40 years and is still standing strong. It’s a big part of my entrepreneurial journey. When I was born, they didn’t take me home from the hospital, but straight to the store.
I grew up playing with loose diamonds and rings, watching my family work, and learning how to sell long before I knew what a sales strategy was. Business was part of everyday life. So was understanding people and earning their trust.

At 15, my creative interests started becoming part of the family business. I was always crafting and generally making a mess doing various art projects. In high school, my dad encouraged me to learn Photoshop. He also started introducing me to the marketing people he hired, which back then included the people selling Yellow Pages ads. He always encouraged me to trun my creative talents into a business skill and let me practice by creating ads for the store.

I was a huge fan of Mad Men and became obsessed with all things advertising. I was convinced I was gonna be the next Don Draper and threw myself into all things marketing. At this point, Facebook was becoming a thing, so I created a business page for the store. I started learning how to build websites and create social content.

The minute I turned 18, I started working for agencies, and never looked back.

Over the years, I worked on multinational campaigns for brands like Bosch, Boost Mobile, Blizzard, DIFF Eyewear, Theragun, and Hoffy. From television commercials to paid social campaigns, agency life taught me how to take an idea and turn it into something that could reach millions.

I loved the work, but halfway through my career, I hit a wall.

I was working in beauty marketing, and I started feeling uncomfortable with what we were telling women. Too often, the message came down to making someone feel less beautiful so they would buy a product. I loved being creative, but I needed to feel better about what I was helping sell.

That led me into legal marketing, then mortgage, fintech, insurance, and other technical or highly regulated industries. These businesses have complicated services to explain, strict rules to follow, and customers making big decisions. They’re also often written off as too boring or too regulated to do anything interesting with their brand.

I loved that challenge.

I went on to hold Director of Brand roles across legal, mortgage, and fintech companies. I learned how to navigate compliance, work through the red tape, and make complex businesses feel human.

Today, I’m the founder of The BrandNuè Agency, where we help everyone from startups to legacy businesses grow through brand strategy and creative execution. I call myself a modern-day MADwoman, with a deep love for branding done right and a particular soft spot for industries that people think are impossible to make interesting.

My approach still comes back to what I learned behind my family’s jewelry counter: branding is all about building relationships that get your customers to take action. Whether you are a small shop or an enterprise business, you need to present yourself in a way that lets your customers know who you are, what you stand for, and makes them loyal to continue to support your business.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
There have definitely been struggles.

At the beginning of my career, I got fired from almost every job. I was too eager to move forward and really bad at disagreeing with bosses when I knew their plan of action wouldn’t work. It was a learning curve of balancing my creative enthusiasm with navigating corporate politics.

Growth is never linear, and there were times when I thought I would never succeed.

My biggest struggle came when I was Director of Brand for a large enterprise company. I was speaking with an executive who, for months, had complained that while they were in the top 10 list of businesses (by size) in the US, no one knew their name. I took this challenge and put together a branding strategy that would have made them a household brand within 5 years. The answer I got back?

“I’m not going to waste any money on something I can’t track the ROI of. Buying a game-day ad isn’t going to bring in any customers”.

It didn’t matter that they explicitly asked me for a strategy, or that I had never even suggested an expensive “game-day” ad. This executive believed in nothing but sales, but couldn’t understand that sales alone wasn’t enough to become known.

I lasted 2 more months at that company before things “didn’t work out.”

It was devastating to go from the high of being hired at a large company to the unemployment line, but it was also the best thing to have ever happened.

It was the last straw that convinced me to go out on my own and help those who needed it and believed that the brand could help their business. Since then, my agency has helped hundreds of businesses scale through brand strategy. And as for my old company? It’s still there, but no one knows its name.

We’ve been impressed with The BrandNué Agency, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
The BrandNué Agency differs from most agencies you may be familiar with in many ways.

– We exclusively do branding & content (so no websites, paid media, or SEO from us!)
– We focus on the industries that are “too difficult” for the average marketer (Real Estate, Mortgage, Finance, Insurance, Legal, Healthcare, Energy, and Infrastructure)
– We’re a bit old-school. We’re bringing back the golden age of advertising, just swapping out martini lunches for virtual calls.

I’m proud to make branding accessible to businesses with no other resources to turn to. Many of the companies, founders, and individuals we work with feel stuck because they know they need a brand to stand out and compete with AI alternatives, but don’t have anyone to help them navigate their industries. That’s where we come in.

Our entire team has advertising experience in these industries. We even have an attorney on staff who works with your legal advisors to ensure our creative converts without getting you into regulatory trouble.

Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
It sounds basic, but resiliency.

I learned at a young age that business and life would throw curveballs at you. It’s unavoidable, but it doesn’t mean it’s the end of your world.

It just means that in order to be successful, you have to persevere and find ways to work with what you have.

I credit this mentality to my parents. They immigrated to the US with little resources, leaving their entire world to escape a war-torn country. Watching them grow their business with almost everything set against them was the best lesson in resilience.

It reminds me that no matter how bad things are, there is always an opportunity to work your way through it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.brandnue.agency

Image Credits
Credit – The BrandNué Agency