In January 2026, a group of MRH High School business students walked into the Seafoam office in Maplewood to start building a brand. By April they had a purpose, a set of values, a voice, a tagline, and a visual identity for the MRH Business Ed Program. This is a look at how that volunteer brand workshop for business students worked, and why we keep doing this kind of thing.
A semester-long brand program, not a guest lecture
The students were in Dr. Michael Gibson’s business classes during the spring 2026 semester. Ryan Foizey led the program for Seafoam, and the whole team pitched in: strategy, creative, design, and ads.
We ran the same brand workshop we run with paying clients. We didn’t make a simplified version for teenagers, because the questions a brand has to answer are the same at any age. They’re also hard for a 40-year-old company, so a high school classroom was not going to get an easier set.
The working sessions happened at our office, starting with a January kickoff and running through an April brand aesthetics workshop.
What the students worked through
Over the semester, the students worked through each of these for the MRH Business Ed Program:
- Purpose and vision
- Values
- Target audience
- Competitive positioning
- Brand personality and voice
- Tagline
That is the strategy half of a brand. Most people want to skip to the logo, and most of our client conversations start with someone wanting to skip to the logo. The students didn’t get to. They had to decide who the program was for and what made it different before anyone opened a design file.
Once the strategy was set, our design team turned it into a visual identity. The students’ decisions drove it, so the final look traced back to choices they had made and could explain.
What the students got out of it
The students saw how a brand gets built from start to finish, in the order it gets built for paying clients. Strategy comes first, design follows from it, and every choice has a reason attached.
They also got a look at marketing careers without needing a degree or a connection to get in the door. A lot of people in this field found it by accident. Sitting in a room with strategists, designers, and ad people for a semester makes it a lot less of a mystery.
And they had to present and defend their creative decisions to working professionals. “Why this color?” is a fair question, and “it looked nice” is not an answer we accept from ourselves either.
We’ve been showing up at MRH for a while
This wasn’t our first time working with MRH students:
- 2018: the Seafoam Marketing Challenge. MRH students marketed NAMI St. Louis, producing a SWOT analysis, landing pages, social calendars, and graphics.
- 2019: we built a deliberately terrible website for the marketing class to tear apart and learn from. It was a fun one to make badly.
- 2025-2026: Nikki Bisel mentored students one-on-one at MRH High School’s Community Networking Day.
- Ongoing: we fill MRH snack wishlists and offer shadow days to students interested in marketing.
None of this is a campaign. It’s what a St. Louis business does when its neighborhood school is a few minutes away and has students who are curious about the work.
If you teach, or run a program, and want something similar
If you lead a business class, a youth program, or a nonprofit in the St. Louis area and think students would learn from seeing real marketing work up close, get in touch with us. The process we used with MRH is the same one we describe on our How We Work page, so we can usually tell fast whether it fits your group.