Before the Human Brand X-Ray, I Was Reading Websites

In January 2024, I filmed an episode of The Fairy BOSSmother Show in which I put two websites I had never seen before in front of me and analyzed them live.

At the time, I thought I was demonstrating my work as a brand consultant. I looked at Satural’s, a beauty brand, and Meet Your Meat, a wild-game butcher, and talked through the impressions their websites created for me as an outsider.

Watching that work through the lens of what I do today, I notice something else.

The subject of the analysis was different. The instinct was already there.

I Wanted to See It Before Anyone Explained It to Me

One detail about this episode matters more to me now than the website advice itself: I deliberately chose businesses whose websites I had never seen before.

I wanted the first impression.

Before the owners could give me all the context they carried in their heads, I could only respond to the evidence in front of me. What did I think this business was? What story did the page appear to be telling? What caught my attention? What confused me? What assumptions was I making from the signals available?

That outside position was useful precisely because I didn't know everything the person inside the business knew.

Being Close to Something Changes What You Can See

When you have built something yourself, you know the intentions behind it. You know why a sentence is there, why a decision was made and what you meant people to understand.

The stranger arriving for the first time doesn't have any of that.

They build an impression from what is actually available to them.

In 2024, I was applying that idea to websites. Over time, I became much more interested in applying it to people.

The Website Was the Subject. The Observation Was the Method.

The Human Brand X-Ray did not exist when I filmed this episode. I wasn't secretly performing one before I had given it a name.

But looking backwards, I can see one of the skills that eventually became central to it: encountering something without being told what I was supposed to see, noticing the signals in front of me and reflecting back the picture they created.

As The Fairy BOSSmother Show evolved from teaching personal branding into conversations with guests, I found myself paying more attention to the human being in front of me. I noticed contradictions, repeated language, stories, reactions and patterns that sometimes seemed much more obvious from my side of the conversation than from theirs.

Eventually, that observational work became the Human Brand X-Ray.

What Other People See Is Evidence Too

We naturally give enormous weight to our intentions because we know them. Other people can't see our intentions directly. They respond to what reaches them.

That doesn't mean their interpretation is automatically correct. It means their interpretation tells us something important about the evidence they received.

That distinction has become central to my work today.

I am less interested in telling somebody what identity to manufacture and much more interested in examining what is already showing up: the signals, patterns and contradictions another person can notice from the outside.

An Early Piece of the Human Brand X-Ray Story

This old website-audit episode is not how I would describe my work today. I no longer offer website audits, and I am not preserving it as a tutorial on homepage optimization.

I am preserving it because careers leave evidence.

Years before I formalized the Human Brand X-Ray, I was already fascinated by what becomes visible when you look at something from the outside without being given the answer first.

Back then, I was reading websites.

Eventually, I realized the thing I was most interested in reading was people.