Maura Walters
Founder & Creative Director
Helping visionaries shape unforgettable brand stories.
Maura Walters is a brand strategist and business mentor who loves bringing big-brand energy to businesses through powerful storytelling. She’s worked with Fortune 500 companies and mom-and-pop shops alike, and her favorite clients all have a few things in common: they care deeply about what they do, they’re creative and bold, and they think big.
Core expertise
Creative Direction
Brand Strategy
Editorial Writing
Storytelling
Visual Identity
Content Architecture
Campaign Design
Mentorship
The story so far
Maura Walters spent a decade in national media at New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and Condé Nast Traveler, and some of her favorite stories to tell were about founders and entrepreneurs: the risk-takers and dreamers building something from scratch. The more of them she interviewed, the more she wanted to help, in a bigger way than one article ever could. So in 2020, she launched Ignite Studio to do exactly that.
Today she leads a team of strategists, writers, designers, and marketers who work with everyone from solo founders to established brands, helping them get clear on what makes them different, tell better stories, and show up in front of the people who need to see them.
Every week on Substack, Maura writes about what it really looks like to build a business and a life you love: the lessons, decisions, mistakes, boundaries, and occasional plot twists that come with working for yourself. She also mentors a small group of female entrepreneurs one-on-one, helping them build businesses that are profitable, sustainable, and designed around the lives they want to live.
10 years
In national media
3
Webby Award nominations
2020
Ignite Studio founded
Milestones & honors
Inc. Magazine columnist
Maura writes an advice column for Inc. for women who work for themselves.
Condé Nast Traveler
As digital executive editor, she led a site that earned three Webby Award nominations and Condé Nast’s Biggest Growth in Digital award.
Weber Shandwick
As vice president of integrated media, she led content strategy for brands including Royal Caribbean, Nespresso, Diageo and Anheuser-Busch.
Featured in Vogue and The Wall Street Journal
Her story and her work have been covered in both.