At Your One & Only, we keep our core team intentionally lean – because great branding isn’t about headcount, it’s about perspective.
We’re led by founder Tara Ladd (behavioural brand strategist) and Samantha Geering (studio manager and operations backbone). Between lived experience, global agency work, and precision operations, we’ve built a way of working that combines big-picture creativity with systems that actually deliver.
Around us? A curated network of designers, writers, researchers, and cultural specialists who jump in when the work demands it. No bloated overheads, no cookie-cutter templates – just the right minds at the right time.
This is how we create brands for the sectors reshaping society: flexible, psychology-driven, and always built with belonging in mind.
TARA LADD
Founder & Behavioural Brand Strategist
Tara has spent 18+ years working out why people make the choices they make – and how brands can earn not just attention, but trust. Her career began in big-agency creative, building campaigns for brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Telstra. But after a decade in advertising, Tara saw the same patterns repeating: loud logos, flashy visuals, and branding built for boardrooms instead of real people.
That’s when she built Your One & Only – a psychology-driven brand strategy and design studio for the sectors reshaping society.
Her lived experience is what makes her different. As an ADHD entrepreneur raising two neurodivergent boys (one a transplant recipient), she’s spent years navigating healthcare, education, and business systems that weren’t built for families like hers. That advocacy sharpened her ability to spot patterns others miss — from the blind spots in medical communication to the biases hidden in brand messaging.
Today, Tara’s specialty is turning those insights into brands that make people feel seen. Because when someone finally feels understood, they don’t just buy from you – they become your biggest advocates.
She now partners with women’s health innovators, wellness tech founders, neurodivergent inclusion advocates, nonprofits, and conscious consumer brands to build psychology-first brand systems. Her work has been recognised not only for design, but for shaping conversations around equity, access, and belonging in branding.
When Tara’s not leading strategy sessions or hosting the Brand & Butter podcast, you’ll find her speaking on stages about psychology-first branding, inclusivity, and the future of identity in business.
Follow her on Linkedin for her most recent opinions and insights.
Samantha Geering
Studio Manager & Operations Backbone
Sam is the reason big creative ideas actually turn into brands that live in the real world. Her role at YO&O is part studio manager, part systems architect, and part cultural translator – bridging Tara’s pattern-spotting brand strategy with the operational frameworks that make it actionable.
Her career spans over a decade in healthcare operations, where she honed her ability to manage precision, compliance, and human needs all at once. She spent 10 years in dental surgery operations before moving into the creative industries, where she’s now spent 6+ years making impossible projects possible. That unusual mix means she brings both the “this has to be right” mindset of healthcare and the “let’s make it happen” energy of creative studios.
Like Tara, Sam’s lived experience is part of what makes her work different. She and her family are neurodivergent, and she lives with endometriosis. She knows first-hand what it means to navigate systems that don’t work for you – and she applies that empathy to every process she builds. Whether it’s advocating for her kids in schools, designing a project plan that works for ADHD brains, or finding ways to reduce client overwhelm, Sam ensures the systems behind the creativity actually serve the humans involved.
At YO&O, Sam is the bridge between vision and delivery. She ensures that every brand strategy doesn’t just exist in a deck, but becomes a living system clients can run with. Her role is invisible when done well: clients simply feel clarity, flow, and confidence instead of chaos.
When she’s not coordinating projects and creative collaborators, Sam is exploring new ways to integrate accessibility and inclusion into studio operations – proving that the back-end of branding is just as important as the front-end design.
