Most work doesn’t speak for itself. This episode is for everyone who's sick of presenting amazing work and ideas that don't land. International keynote speaker, coach, and designer Ben Sauer breaks down how he teaches the art of strategic storytelling.

Ben Sauer trained people all over the world, including at NASA, and his frameworks are used by organizations like Amazon, Google, and the BBC.

In this episode, Phoebe Ohayon and Ben Sauer discuss his book, Death by Screens, which teaches designers (or anyone with something to pitch) how to present their idea without boring people to tears!

Bold & Boutique isn’t just about voice, design or AI — it’s about building something meaningful by going deep, not wide. It’s a show for creatives, strategists, and entrepreneurs who believe that staying niche can be a superpower. Let’s explore what it really takes to grow a business rooted in expertise.

Season 1 dives into the rise of AI characters and virtual brand ambassadors, but future seasons will open up to a wide range of topics shaping the creative and technological landscape, all with the same boutique lens: focused & intentional.

After user research and quantitative testing comes the real force multiplier: a design system that lets every team spin up on-brand AI characters without reinventing the wheel. Phoebe explains why a system is more than a style guide and how it becomes the shared language for voice, visuals, and behavior across markets.

Highlights

- Style guide ≠ design system – how reusable assets, research-backed rules, and governance turn a static brand book into a living toolkit that accelerates creative work instead of policing it.

- Core building blocks – voice-tone tokens, expression libraries, “basic pause” timing, fallback-response prompts, error-recovery patterns, earcons, and perception-test templates.

• - Begin with the end in mind – anchoring the system to the company’s mission so every asset (from TTS voice profiles to UX flows) ladders up to the same north star.

• - Politics & practicality – picking the right contributors, defusing naming battles, and using data (not opinions) to resolve push-pull between global consistency and local nuance.

• - Lightweight → enterprise-grade – why a starter kit of reusable prompts is still a design system, and how it can grow into code packages, speech-data pipelines, and performance benchmarks.

• - Scalable guidance, not rigid rules – giving regional teams research frameworks and analysis tools to localize characters while staying unmistakably on-brand.

  
  

• If you’ve nailed a single AI character and are wondering, “How do we replicate this across products, languages, or markets without chaos?”—this episode shows how to turn hard-won insights into a system that scales creativity rather than stifling it.