Lyssa Gagne

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT LYSSA GAGNE

Growing up, my brother and I would spend hours building stories — creating characters, dropping them into worlds, and asking the real questions: what happens when they\'re stranded on an island? Who do they become when the rules disappear and survival depends entirely on who they are at their core?That instinct never left. It just found a new medium.I\'ve spent the last eight years thinking about brands the way I once thought about characters — as living things with personalities, voices, and ways of showing up that either feel authentic or fall flat. Strip away the budget, the guidelines, the team — does the brand still feel like itself? That\'s the question that drives the work.My job is to build the systems that let a brand exist consistently across every touchpoint, team, and channel, without losing what makes it distinctly itself. That means visual systems, governance frameworks, template ecosystems, and integrated campaigns — the infrastructure that lets a brand scale without breaking.Currently at Xello, I\'m building AI-assisted workflows that bring branded visual generation in-house — its own kind of world-building, designing the rules of the world so others can create within it confidently.When I\'m not thinking about brand systems, I\'m usually exploring small towns, wandering through galleries, or on a trail with Poppy and Dottie, two doodles with very strong opinions about which trails are worth it.