Through an intimate and intentional process, Slow Blink builds upon the fundamentals of oral storytelling to craft bold and engaging stories in service of honest and consistent communication practices.
With a background in traditional marketing and creative writing practices, Slow Blink saw a need for organizations to implement creative processes to tell compelling stories behind their brands. As Slow Blink began to work with clients, it became apparent that the marketing space needed a shift towards genuineness and authenticity. Slow Blink’s vision then became to fuse old school principles with innovative techniques, thereby blending together a for-profit mind with a non-profit heart.
This new approach builds upon the rich history and structure of storytelling with the goal to understand, ground and enlighten the human narratives that each organization holds within.
Today, Slow Blink collaborates with clients from small family businesses to healthcare organizations helping them slow down at the right time to effectively communicate with flexibility, speed, and endurance on behalf of their brands.
What does
Slow Blink
mean?
The name Slow Blink comes from our thoughts on the combinatorial nature and power of creativity: to unlock truly creative ideas, we need to slow our process, processes, and processing down just enough to think, and ink, more clearly, deeply, and integratively. The name Slow Blink is an encouragement and reminder: to think and rethink our involuntary impulses and practices. There is a saying in the digital media world — be easy to follow but hard to catch — but in order to move swiftly in these ever-shifting digital landscapes of media, content, and commentary, we need to slow down at the right time and in the right places. The name “Slow Blink” also has a serendipitous connection to cats: when a cat slow-blinks, it’s a sign of trust, safety, and love. The goal, then, is collective.
Bretty Rawson
Founder
Bretty Rawson is a Seattle-based narrative & story consultant. In 2022, he created the storytelling agency Slow Blink, distilling a fifteen-year career as a digital strategist for social-justice based nonprofits, government marketing agencies, and independent day schools in Washington State and New York. Most recently, he ran digital for the wine industry in Washington State, where he worked with 1,000+ wineries and 400+ grape growers to tell—over the course of nearly five years—1,980 stories about the past, present, and future of Washington Wine. At the time he left, their digital presence was the fastest growing in the world of wine.
The heart of Bretty’s work is community-building. In 2015, after receiving an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School for Public Engagement in New York City, Bretty co-founded the national arts nonprofit The Seventh Wave, a BIPOC- and queer-run magazine that publishes art in the space of social issues. The Seventh Wave is where story anchors began, as Bretty was tasked with audience development and building the voice of the brand. TSW has been nationally recognized by the Community of Literary Magazine and Presses for its annual literary magazine, and has received funding from The Academy of American Poets, ArtsWA, and 4Culture, among others. Most recently, as Director of Programs, Bretty designed and developed TSW’s Community Anthologies program, a cohort-based storytelling program that gives writers and artists the keys to become curators and produce their own anthology of writing and art, which within a month of launch, was funded by a local philanthropic institute for its innovative approach to storytelling.
The focus of Bretty’s work has always been about elevating human voices. For example, the bilingual storytelling program he built for Washington Wine, called “Breaking Ground,” was featured in Forbes for its innovative approach to community building in the wine industry (centering the farming community for the first time), and his digital exhibit To Whom It Should Concern, a partnership between Handwritten and Teens Take Charge, a student-led coalition in New York City, was featured by The New York Times for its innovative approach to addressing education inequity in the public school system (giving students the pen and paper, stage and mic). His work has led him to stages of his own, delivering keynote speeches at writing symposiums, presenting at annual conferences on community building in the digital space, and hosting educational workshops for groups of marketing and communications professionals.
Digital storytelling is not a linear profession or pursuit: Bretty has an academic background in economics and psychology (BA) as well as creative (nonfiction) writing (MFA), and he has lived, traveled, and worked in disparate corners of the world, from spending three summer harvests in fishing canneries in the Aleutian Islands (most recently, a 10-week stint in Dutch Harbor, homebase of The Deadliest Catch show) to two years in rural Japan teaching English at elementary and junior high schools. Bretty often has one foot in education — he’s coached junior varsity soccer and golf at high schools and schools, driving a yellow van to and from victory and defeat — or language, as he was once the lead interpreter for Yayoi Kusama’s head architect during the first build of her infinity room in New York City at The David Zwirner Art Gallery.