This week’s solo episode takes you behind the scenes of one of the most fun projects I have worked on this year: the full rebrand of the Mum Means Business podcast AND my photography business, Victoria Phipps Photography.
I share why I decided the time was right to invest in a professional graphic designer, what the process actually looked like and how working with the brilliant Liz Mosley of Building Your Brand helped me to see the threads running through everything I do for the very first time.
But this episode is about more than design. It is also about confidence, perfectionism and what it means to launch something before it is perfect because you finally trust yourself enough to know that the work itself is what matters most.
Key Reflections:
- Why the visual identity of both my photography business and the podcast had started to feel like a different version of me and what finally prompted me to invest in a professional rebrand
- How I found Liz Mosley and why the trust built through years of listening to her podcast made choosing her as a designer feel completely natural, the chocolate in the post helped too
- The concept Liz came back with that stopped me in my tracks, threads, and how that single idea helped me see that motherhood, business, family, freedom, flexibility, community, connection and impact were running through everything I do
- Why the squiggles and colours of the new brand feel like a child’s drawing in the best possible way, playful, positive and genuinely cheering to work with every single day
- How the eight week design process unfolded, from initial concepts through font hierarchies and logo variations to a brand that could stretch across multiple businesses and platforms
- The decision to launch the brand on the 50th episode even though the websites were not fully updated yet and why letting go of that perfectionism felt like a genuine milestone
- How my relationship with perfectionism has shifted over ten months of podcasting and what that reveals about confidence, competence and the slow but real work of rebuilding yourself after early motherhood
- The connection between this rebrand story and Yinka Ewuola’s episode on legitimacy, websites and trusting your offer.
Listen If You’re:
- Considering a rebrand or a first professional brand and wondering whether the investment is worth it
- Running multiple strands of a business and struggling to make them feel cohesive visually and in your own head
- Holding back from launching or sharing something because it is not quite perfect yet
- Curious about what a design process with a professional graphic designer actually looks like from the inside
- Someone who finds that aesthetics genuinely matter to how you show up and feel about your work
- Ready to hear that confidence is something you build over time and that ten months of showing up can change everything
Favourite Takeaway for Mums in Business:
Confidence can drop off a cliff in early motherhood and for a lot of women it can feel like a struggle to get it back. I’ve learned that actually confidence builds when you take action. Starting this podcast has led to healing conversations with other women which have helped to rebuild my confidence piece by piece. Previously I’d have killed myself to get this brand fully rolled out for launch day. But even as a “control enthusiast” I promise it’s possible to let go of perfectionism and trust that the quality of your work is what matters most.
About the Host:
I’m Victoria Phipps – a Mum of two, analogue family photographer, charity co-founder, photography business educator, marketer and now podcaster! My career has wandered all over the place and is becoming a bit of a complex tapestry as I head into this middle phase of life, but I can honestly say I’ve loved every minute of it so far.
I was raised by a nurturing Mother and an entrepreneurial Father and have inherited traits from both, so the tension between ambition and motherhood is one I grapple with on a daily basis! I’m fascinated to hear the stories of other women on a similar path, who are striving to build thriving businesses whilst being present for their children. It’s a tough juggle, but I hope the conversations shared on this podcast help Mums in business feel less alone and inspired to keep going in pursuit of their dreams!
If You Enjoyed This Episode:
Please subscribe, rate and review the podcast – it helps other mums find us!
Share in your Instagram stories, tag @mummeansbusinesspodcast and let us know your biggest takeaway and if you are considering going to Atomicon in Manchester next year, I’d love to see you there!
Share this episode with a fellow Mum in business who you feel would resonate with my ramblings.
Episode Transcript:
NOTE: This is the transcript from the original recording, rather than the edited episode so timings may vary.
Victoria (00:01)
Hello and welcome to this solo episode of the Mum Means Business podcast. Today I thought it might be interesting to talk you through the recent rebrand process that I went through for the Mum Means Business podcast and for my photography business. I suppose I’ll start with why. Why did I decide to invest in a professional graphic designer to take a look at my business and all the visual aesthetics and work with me to design a new brand?
The main reason is that my business didn’t look the same as it had done when I had my last brand done. I established my photography business in 2009 and in 2019, weddings became illegal, which is what I was primarily shooting. So when I emerged out of the pandemic with two babies in tow, I pivoted and moved from weddings to family portraits shot exclusively on film. The old fashioned stuff that your mum used to take into Boots and they would make you six by four prints in a little paper wallet. That was the last time I had my logo and colours refreshed, which was 2021.
Then fast forward to July 2025, I launched the Mum Means Business podcast and that brand was completely DIY. I picked some fun colours that I liked, found a font that looked all right and threw it all together and put it out into the world. At that point I didn’t know how far down the line this podcast would get. I was coming at it as a complete newbie. It was an experiment. I suspected I would love it but I really didn’t know. So I was happy to start with something that perhaps wasn’t perfect because I didn’t want to invest money into a project that was going to last all of three months.
Moving forward, the podcast lasted longer, I am committed to it and I felt like it was time to elevate the brand a little bit.
Earlier this year in January 2026, I launched my first ever online course, Print Over Pixels, teaching family photographers how to lead with print rather than digital and deliver an elevated client experience in the digital age so that they can stand out from the crowd.
Then fast forward to early spring 2026. Because of the podcast, I started being approached by female founders asking whether I would also do personal branding photography. This is an area I have dabbled in throughout my photography career, but personal branding is not the same as a commercial headshot. Whilst I’ve done plenty of headshots, this is a whole new landscape where business owners need lots and lots of photos of themselves to feed the digital marketing machine. So that has been a really fun thing to explore during the spring and early summer of this year, but it added another layer to my business.
I was looking at it all in April thinking, how the hell do these things fit together? Do they fit together? I might be a multi-passionate person, but is it possible to build a successful multifaceted business? It’s not exactly in line with the 90-10 rule that I spoke about in my Atomicon debrief. As a photographer and perhaps as a millennial, aesthetics really matter to me. The different brand aesthetics made it all feel like a bit of a mess, both in terms of external perception but also in my own head. Each business leaned into a different aesthetic and I felt like having an umbrella across all of it that I could roll out through my offers would give me more confidence to actually market them online and in person.
This speaks to the idea of a personal brand, which had always terrified me because of the potential for judgment. Like, who the hell am I to have a personal brand? But that’s probably a conversation for a different episode.
The point is it was time to elevate the graphic design of the Mum Means Business podcast. My Victoria Phipps photography logo and colours had been done five years ago and that honestly felt like a different version of me. So having made the decision to bite the bullet and invest in something that would better reflect what I’m doing now, I started looking at graphic designers.
This is a testament to the trust that can build through podcasting, because Liz Mosley, host of the Building Your Brand podcast, was one of the first women I thought of. Her voice had kept me company on long car journeys, in the garden and through long sessions at the ironing board for a couple of years. Having had her on the podcast a few months ago, we’d already done a deep dive into all things parenting and business building and I just suspected that working with her would be really fun.
I spoke to a couple of other designers, but as a midlife woman building her business whilst raising her kids with a podcast to boot, I felt like Liz instinctively got the challenge I was trying to solve. It also felt very fitting that the Mum Means Business podcast would be branded by a mum in business.
I asked Liz if she would work with me. She was delighted, and she sent me some chocolate in the post, which just confirmed I had absolutely made the right decision. She came back about a week later with a few different concepts and one stood out immediately. It was all about threads.
Going through this design process helped me to understand that there were in fact threads running through everything I was doing: motherhood, business, family, freedom and flexibility, community, connection and impact. Every element of my business did in fact speak to these things in its own way. Liz created a beautiful illustrative depiction of this that also spoke to the messy middle that we are always referring to. The more I sat with it, the more layers slowly revealed themselves. The squiggles look like a child’s drawing and the colours are just so fun and playful and positive and cheering. I recently sent Liz an email saying it’s so lovely to have a brand that actually cheers you up. When you go to work and you go to create content, you feel quite uplifted by your own brand, which is amazing.
Liz developed the concept further, refined the exact colours, suggested fonts and we established a hierarchy of fonts. She worked on the logos, considering all the time how the brand might be adapted or adopted by each element of the business. The whole process took around eight weeks and it was such a joy to work with her. We came to decisions at every stage really naturally and intuitively, all the time with a deadline in mind: I wanted to launch the brand on the 50th episode of the podcast, which was mid June.
That brings me to another thing worth touching on: I let go of perfectionism. I didn’t mind if that launch was just on social media and on the podcast platforms, because I knew I probably didn’t have time to revisit all three websites and implement the new design across all of them within that timeframe.
It’s interesting because when I launched the Mum Means Business podcast, I had so much imposter syndrome to deal with and I really felt like I had to have all the i’s dotted and all the t’s crossed because that would make me feel more legitimate. It speaks to the confidence evolution that at that point I was so nervous about launching in an area I didn’t feel confident in at all. I wasn’t competent. I had no idea what I was doing. I was completely winging it. So having the website set and knowing all the visual language was consistent across every platform was essential to me in order to actually do the thing.
Fast forward ten months and I feel confident. I know that because I was happy to have a brand on social media that was different to my website for a short period of time. I’m confident that the offer, the things I’m delivering, are right up there. I know how to podcast now. I know how to take a good picture. I know how to teach other photographers how to implement in-person sales and lead with print in their businesses. So actually these other things didn’t matter so much.
It reminded me of my conversation with Yinka Ewuola, whose episode I will link in the show notes. She talked about the fact that she didn’t have a website, that she didn’t need one, that she was confident in her offer and the transformation it could deliver. She managed to scale her business to six and seven figures through LinkedIn, networking and word of mouth with no website. I am proud of myself that I managed to let go of that perfectionism and it is a testament to the healing power of this podcast that it has literally rebuilt my confidence after it dropped off a cliff in early motherhood.
Back to the brand. A huge thank you to Liz for making the whole design process so fun. If you haven’t listened to the Building Your Brand podcast, I will link to that in the show notes too.
I hope this has been interesting to you as a fellow mum in business with a brand of your own and I would love to hear what you think of the new brand that Liz designed. If you are considering a rebrand yourself, have any questions or just want to share your thoughts, come and find me on Instagram. Slide into my DMs at @mummeansbusinesspodcast or @victoriaphippsmbe. I will speak to you soon.