28 years in the room.
Ghost Creative is the consulting practice of Steve Ruml — a brand and marketing strategist with 28 years of hands-on experience inside the problems that growing CPG and ecommerce brands face every day.
Steve has worked across print design, packaging, brand identity, advertising, ecommerce, Amazon optimization, retail grocery, Costco, trade show production, and product photography — with brands at every stage, from early packaging decisions to national retail expansion. The work today operates at the strategy layer, but the execution fluency underneath is what makes the strategy land.
Most growing brands don't have a senior marketing mind guiding decisions.
They have designers. They have agencies. They have people executing tactics. What they often lack is someone who can step back, look at the full picture, and say: here's what actually matters, and here's what to do about it.
That's the role Ghost Creative fills. Not as a vendor. As a fractional strategic partner.
Strategy from someone who's done the work.
Steve's background is unusual because it spans both the strategic and the executional. Twenty-eight years across print design, packaging, brand identity, advertising, ecommerce, Amazon listings, retail merchandising, A+ content, trade show production, and product photography. He's been the designer, the production lead, the Amazon manager, and the brand-side person sitting across from a buyer at Costco — sometimes all in the same week.
That depth matters. It means the strategy he develops is grounded in the real world — not disconnected from how things actually get made, printed, listed, and sold. When Steve directs your team, he directs from experience, not theory. He can spot what's going to be a problem before it ships, because he's shipped enough of it himself to know.
It's also why prospects find conversations with Steve feel different from the typical strategist call: there's no translation layer, no middle-man explaining what their designer or printer or 3PL meant. He's been all three.
Strategic depth. Modern leverage.
Ghost Creative is consciously evolving. The next decade of brand growth runs through three forces most consultants only handle one of: brand clarity, AI-assisted execution, and paid acquisition + lifecycle that's actually built on the brand foundation. Steve is building a practice that handles all three together — including direction across Meta, TikTok, email, and the AI workflows that tie them together.
That means the same person who tells you to fix your packaging is also the person telling you which ad creative will work, what your retention emails should say, where AI saves your team forty hours a week, and how the whole system fits into a brand position that holds up at scale.
One mind, one strategy, one accountable partner — instead of three vendors blaming each other.
Better decisions, not more marketing.
The philosophy behind Ghost Creative is simple: most brands don't need more marketing activity. They need clearer thinking about the marketing they're already doing.
That means slowing down before scaling up. Fixing the message before increasing the budget. Making the product hierarchy clear before adding more SKUs.
Clarity converts. Confusion costs money.
Why Ghost Creative?
Ghost Creative was built around the idea of being the strategic presence behind a brand — not out front, not taking credit, but embedded where the real decisions happen. The best strategic partners work that way. They make the brand stronger without making it about themselves.
That's the intent. Senior-level thinking, without the ego or the overhead.
If this sounds like what your brand needs —
Let's start with a conversation. No pitch deck. No commitment. Just a direct discussion about where your brand is and where you want it to go.
Schedule a call →