Sam brings two decades of experience creating distinctive brand worlds across fashion, beauty, entertainment, and culture. Her work spans global campaigns, brand identities, launches, and award-winning content for brands including Gucci Beauty, HOURGLASS, Kitsch, Estée Lauder, Disney, Netflix, Depop, and Chanel.
Previously, Sam served as Global Creative Director for HOURGLASS Cosmetics, where she led global campaigns and brand-defining work, including the award-winning “Eye to Eye” campaign with Mark Seliger. At Kitsch, she led a full-scale brand reinvention that helped drive more than 80% annual growth and launch collaborations with Barbie and Disney.
Sam has a remarkable ability to turn strategy into a fully realized creative vision—combining sharp cultural instinct, aesthetic rigor, and storytelling that gives brands a world people want to enter.
We cannot wait to see the impact she will make across our clients, our creative team, and the work ahead. Welcome to Our House Sam!
Here are 15 Questions to help you get to know Sam:
1. What first drew you to a career in creative?
I grew up in New York City, and my mom was a color forecaster for a fashion textile company in the Garment District. After school, I’d hang out in her office surrounded by drag queens, mood boards, fabric swatches and piles of visual references I didn’t totally understand yet, but desperately wanted to be part of. She’d come home from Paris Fashion Week with strange little treasures she’d collected for me along the way. To me, the whole thing felt impossibly glamorous. Looking back, I think I was watching creative direction happen before I even knew there was a name for it. I fell in love with the idea that you could collect seemingly unrelated things, put them together, and suddenly create an entire world. I just knew I wanted to be the person making the world
2. How would you describe your creative style in three words?
Three is too hard! Emotional. Instinctive. Unexpected. Precise.
3. What’s one creative principle you'll never compromise on?
It has to make you feel something. I don’t care how beautiful, strategic or technically perfect something is. If there’s no emotional response, it’s decoration.
4. What does great creative work always have in common?
A clear point of view. The work I remember most feels like it could only have come from that brand, that artist, that moment. Great creative doesn’t try to appeal to everyone. It commits.
5. Where do you typically look for inspiration?
Everywhere except advertising, ideally. Old magazines, films, album covers, architecture, flea markets, packaging, people on the street, hotel lobbies, weird corners of the internet. I’m a file hoarder, constantly taking screenshots and photographing things. Inspiration usually comes from connecting two references that were never supposed to live together. I think creative direction is basically pattern recognition with taste.
6. What’s a piece of work you’ve created that you’re especially proud of?
Eye to Eye for Hourglass. The entire idea started with an old Icelandic photograph I found of a woman standing eye to eye with a horse. At the time, we were making a pretty radical shift for a luxury beauty brand, committing to becoming fully vegan by 2020 and putting our love of animals at the center of the brand. We shot these incredibly arresting portraits with Mark Seliger on a rescue horse farm, pairing women eye to eye with these majestic animals. It grew into a social movement, with people recreating the images with their own pets, and a partnership with the Nonhuman Rights Project supporting the freedom of animals in captivity. What I love most is that this entire world, and a real turning point for the brand, grew from one photograph and one idea. I still get emotional when I think about it.
7. What’s one creative risk you’re glad you took?
Leaving the security of being an in-house Global Creative Director to build my own practice. It forced me to trust my point of view instead of a title, and it completely expanded the kind of brands, industries and people I could work with.
8. What’s a trend you’re loving right now, and one you’re ready to retire?
Loving the return of things that feel touched by a human hand. Messy typography, collage, texture, flash photography, practical effects, analog processes, things that are a little imperfect. The more AI can make everything technically perfect, the more I want evidence that a person was there.
I’m ready to retire algorithmic sameness (and “Quiet Luxury”, snore). The same beige set, the same serif, the same glossy CGI, the same TikTok hook. If I can swap your logo with five other brands and the work still makes sense, we have a problem.
9. What brand do you think is doing something especially interesting creatively?
Jacquemus. They’re one of the best examples of a brand understanding that creative is bigger than a campaign. Every show, installation, image, object and social moment feels like part of the same universe. The work is highly conceptual, but never feels inaccessible. There’s wit, restraint and a really strong understanding of how to create something people want to share without making it feel engineered for engagement.
10. What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
Don’t confuse being easy to work with with always agreeing. Sometimes the most valuable thing a creative director can bring to a room is conviction. Your taste is your career. Protect it.
11. What’s something people might be surprised to learn about you?
I’m deeply obsessed with ping pong. I’ll play for hours in my garage under black lights, music blasting, dancing like an idiot between points. When you really lock in with someone, it becomes this weird little state of flow that feels almost like flying. It’s where I feel the most free and, oddly, where a lot of my best ideas happen.
Oh, and I’m also a triple Scorpio ; )
12. What does your perfect workday look like?
A morning with enough quiet to actually think, followed by a room full of smart people making an idea better. Then getting out from behind the computer and making something real. A shoot, a fitting, a location scout, pulling references, moving things around with my hands. And ideally very few meetings that could have been emails.
13. What song is currently on repeat?
Magma by King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard. To say I’m obsessed with them would be an understatement.
14. What’s one thing you’ll always make time for outside of work?
The people I love. Work can expand infinitely if you let it.
15. Now that you’re officially part of Social House, what are you most excited to create together?
I’m excited to help make work that closes the gap between “social content” and “brand creative.” The best ideas shouldn’t have to choose between being culturally relevant, beautifully crafted and effective. Social is where brands actually live every day now, so I think it deserves the same level of imagination and authorship we’ve traditionally reserved for big campaigns. I’m excited to do that with a team that moves fast enough to actually participate in culture instead of commenting on it six months later.