During my years freelancing in Los Angeles, I spent a significant amount of time embedded within the direct mail ecosystems of agencies such as Rauxa Direct and Campbell Mithun. These were the kinds of shops where you learned to think fast, work clean, and respect the craft of high-volume, high-precision production. But like many West Coast agencies, their workloads ebbed during the slower summer stretch, and at one point both shops found themselves unexpectedly light on assignments.

Then my inbox started lighting up.

Both agencies reached out within days of each other, asking whether I could take on remote work for them because their client, DirecTV, was suddenly experiencing an enormous overflow of creative needs. A new campaign had launched with the goal of winning back former subscribers during the height of the OTA/OTV battles — when Dish, an expanding universe of streaming services, and DirecTV were all fighting tooth-and-nail for market share. The agencies didn’t have the available staff for the surge, and the projects weren’t quite large enough to justify reallocating full teams.

But they trusted me.

And they referred me — which in Los Angeles is its own currency.

Each regional market had its own design nuances and aesthetic tendencies, but the messaging was consistent across the entire national footprint. Working remotely, I navigated the visual rhythms of multiple regions simultaneously: adjusting type hierarchies, promotional layouts, calls-to-action, and brand behaviors to match local expectations while still maintaining the national strategy. That type of adaptability — knowing when to honor regional specificity and when to keep the brand locked tight — is something that only comes from real-world volume and repetition.

Not long after the remote work began, DirecTV requested that I come into their headquarters to support both print and digital asset development directly. Suddenly, I wasn’t just building direct mail kits; I was touching brochures, sales materials, and large-format out-of-home placements. If you were in Southern California at that time, there’s a decent chance you saw something I designed — whether in your mailbox, on a freeway billboard, or tucked inside a retail environment.

Within a year, word had spread beyond the Pacific region.

Chicago and New York began requesting me specifically to execute their local versions of the campaign. It was one of those rare periods where freelance opportunity, brand trust, and high-volume creative needs all converged — and it cemented my reputation as someone who could not only handle scale, but elevate it.