About Dawn Hagin

Dawn is a "wouldn't it be cool if" kind of thinker. She wakes up with ideas in her head and can't wait to share them. Prior to founding Rare Bird Strategic, Dawn was a founding partner, chief marketing officer, and brand creator of Lark Hotels, one of the nation’s fastest-growing boutique hotel collections. Under her purview, the collection maintained year-over-year revenue growth for all hotel properties, even with a streamlined marketing budget of 2-4%. Dawn also founded and served as publisher of the group's On a Lark magazine and managed brand partnerships with other, dynamic, growing companies. 

As a communications consultant, Dawn led re-engineering communications campaigns for Blue Shield of California and Union Bank of California. She crafted and launched the first email marketing campaign at Cellular One of California in the mid-90s. In 2001, she co-founded Rare Brick, one of the first luxury inn/hotel branding, web design, and photography firms to use immersive rich media and large format photography to evolve lodging websites from simple online brochures to visually compelling sales tools.

Dawn spilts her time traveling the world and working remotely with her husband, Adam, and working from her home in Sedona, AZ.

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Portland Wine Week

CASE STUDY: Rare Bird Strategic was instrumental in launching a successful new wine fest, Portland Wine Week, in Portland, Maine in the summer of 2018. Founder, Erica Archer of Wine Wise, had always dreamed of founding and holding a wine festival in the dynamic seaside town where she had built her successful wine education and events business. Even with incredible restaurant, wine distributor, and local business connections and a keen marketing background of her own, she needed additional help. With a thriving business and a packed schedule, she wanted someone with vision to help her craft the brand, market it, and keep her on pace with her massive “to do” list. Rare Bird Strategic created the identity and brand voice; conceived, structured, and wrote the website, all collateral and a weekly email newsletter; oversaw the talented design team; spearheaded the digital marketing strategy; conceptualized, wrote, and handled all Portland Wine Week branded social media content and advertising; found and negotiated with the media sponsor (Down East Magazine); handled press/media outreach (with hits in the Portland Press Herald, Boston Globe, Yankee Magazine, and more); strategized and coordinated video content development with the video crew; assisted with large event conceptualization, planning and set-up; and generally helped a very busy Erica pull off an incredibly successful first-year weeklong festival.

TESTIMONIAL: "Dawn is an amazing talent on so many levels. When she signed on to help me with Portland Wine Week I had no idea to what lengths she would go to to help ensure its success. It never would have been as professional and well-crafted without her. Her impact was HUGE." — Erica Archer.

Vertical Harvest Farms

CASE STUDY: Born from the creative minds of a group of women in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Vertical Harvest became the first vertical greenhouse in the Northern Hemisphere in 2016. This multi-story hydroponic farm produces incredibly fresh, local food 365 days a year, and provides meaningful employment to one of the nation’s most underserved employee populations — the developmentally and intellectually disabled. With the goal to expand nationwide, Vertical Harvest brought Rare Bird Strategic onboard in the summer of 2020 to help refine and reposition the brand. Dawn held a brainstorming session with the Vertical Harvest leadership team to zero in on the messages most likely to connect and appeal to the farm’s primary audience — potential investors. She crafted new language positioning potential investors as “changemakers” and inviting them to join Vertical Harvest in tackling both food and job insecurity throughout the US. From the website, to the executive summary, to the email and social media marketing, the new messaging cast these potential investors as the heroes helping to make Vertical Harvest’s expansion a reality. Now, in early 2022, the company is completing a successful Series A investment round, and signing agreements with exciting new investment partners. This financial infusion will enable Vertical Harvest to break ground on its second and third farms in 2022, and build 8 more across the US in the next five years.

Portland Food Map

CASE STUDY: Portland Food Map (a website and social media feed), is the definitive news and information resource covering and chronicling Portland Maine’s thriving food community and restaurant scene. Late in 2017, founder and editor, Anestes Fotiades, received a sponsorship offer from a local credit union. Anestes knew he wanted to redesign and improve his website, but he wasn’t sure if this was the best use of the money offered, nor was he sure how to promote the relaunch to get maximum buzz. Rare Bird Strategic helped negotiate the agreement with the sponsor, brought on a talented graphic designer to work on the project, and worked with Anestes and the very skilled website development team in crafting the new website. Rare Bird Strategic also conceived of, wrote copy for, and negotiated additional sponsor money for an accompanying pocket-sized printed map to serve as a promotional tool for the brand. This provided an additional point of news for press outreach, and will now become a revenue source for Portland Food Map. Now, in 2022, PFM is 65K Instagram followers strong and has multiple sponsors for the website, Instagram posts, and the pocket guide.

TESTIMONIAL: "It was great experience working with Rare Bird Strategic on the relaunch of Portland Food Map.  Dawn took the time to understand where I wanted to take the business, and identified and moved forward initiatives that made the launch a huge success. She also pushed me past the point where my own blind spots were getting in the way of achieving my goals. I'd work with her again in a heartbeat and you'd be crazy not to." — Anestes Fotiades

Anna in Bhutan

CASE STUDY: Anna in Bhutan supports women artisans in Bhutan who hand weave and dye textiles with earth-friendly methods. The company’s wearable products are designed by owner Kate Broug, meticulously handwoven by talented Bhutanese weavers, and then blessed for their wearers by high-ranking lamas (monks) of the Buddhist faith. But, the Anna in Bhutan website and marketing materials buried the unique selling proposition of the monk’s blessing. The company’s communications also failed to connect the dots for potential buyers that purchasing the products would help them make not only a beautiful — but also ethical and ecological — fashion statement. Rare Bird Strategic coached the company through a brand repositioning process and developed a detailed website wireframe to repackage the messaging and enhance sales. The redesigned website launched in early 2021.