Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
Iris Chen
Brand Strategist
Iris Chen leads brand strategy across the studio. She's the person who runs the discovery sprints, conducts the customer interviews, and turns a tangle of stakeholder opinions into the single sentence a creative team can actually design against. She has the rare gift of being both rigorous and surprising in the same breath.
About Iris
Iris Chen spent the first six years of her career on the buy side of the table — first at a New York consultancy doing brand research for Fortune 500 clients, then at a private equity firm advising portfolio companies on positioning. She knows what good strategy work looks like from the receiving end, and she has an instinctive nose for the kind of corporate strategy that nobody downstream can actually use.
She joined Fireflies in 2024 to do strategy the way she wished it had been done at the agencies she'd hired. That means smaller engagements, fewer slides, and an unreasonable amount of time spent talking to actual customers and front-line staff before recommending anything. Her discovery decks are famously short and famously specific.
At the studio Iris works alongside Maya on the most ambiguous early-phase engagements — brand refreshes, repositionings, naming projects, and the occasional rescue of a launch that's drifting. She also runs the studio's internal research practice, training designers in the interview techniques and synthesis methods that make the difference between strategy and ornament.
Iris grew up in Vancouver and speaks Mandarin and French alongside English. She reads two novels a week — exclusively in print — and can usually be found at the Park Slope Food Co-op on Sunday mornings, paying her dues like the rest of the membership.
