Chandler Burgess

Creative Director · Product Creative Technologist
Salt Lake City, UT (Remote) · chandler@chandlerburgess.com
chandlerburgess.com · linkedin.com/in/chandler-burgess
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Summary

Most creative directors brief the build. I ship it.

Twenty-one years setting brand vision, campaigns, and content for action sports and resort destinations, most of it spent leading teams — internal, agency, and cross-functional. Creative is home base, but I run the whole funnel — strategy to spend to creative to signal, and back around. Fourteen of those years at Killington. Most recently I led a fifty-year-old brand through a full rebrand, then built and deployed the AI-powered governance platform that keeps it consistent, alone. The story comes first. The system keeps it alive. Fluent from concept and art direction through production code.

Experience

Creative Director & Technical Product Lead

2024–2026
Woodward (POWDR) · Park City, UT
  • Led the rebrand of a 50-year-old action-sports brand — positioning, brand architecture, personality, voice, and visual identity through a period of significant change — then the applied design system: grid, template libraries, and asset kits across social, email, web, and print for camps, mountain centers, and urban centers.
  • Set the audience the brand now speaks to. "The Creative Athlete" — a Gen Z profile of kids who treat sport as self-expression — and the direction that follows across casting, photography, film, sound, and color.
  • Then built the system that holds it, alone. The Brand Operating System, concept to deployment: an 82-page platform became living software — real-time conformance scoring, automated brand review, and on-brand generation across 30 interlocking tools. Four live instances (PA, Park City, Tahoe, Copper). One clip in, 16 on-brand outputs out.
  • Ran it for ~$6–9K a year in platform cost — infrastructure and API multiplying what the creative budget produced, not replacing it. Stack: Anthropic API, React, TypeScript, Supabase, Netlify, GitHub CI/CD, model behind a serverless proxy. Real infrastructure, not a prototype.
  • Ran a full internal agency and built capability inside it — directed video and photography, led the creative team day to day, managed agency and freelance partners. The tooling put on-brand production in the hands of non-designers and removed the review bottleneck.
  • Led partner-brand creative with YETI and Nokian Tyres — 750K+ monthly social impressions off short-form video.
  • Ran the funnel, not just the creative — campaign strategy through paid deployment, working with media partners on allocation and iterating on performance data rather than preference.

Portfolio Creative Strategist

2022–2024
POWDR · Park City, UT
  • Led change management across the portfolio with no direct reports — sent into stalled teams across four separate projects (Mt. Bachelor, plus the national-park concessionaire holdings at Stovepipe Wells, Zion Lodge, and Zion Mountain Ranch). Reset the direction, rebuilt the output, handed it back running. Influence and partnership were the only levers.
  • Architected and deployed a centralized DAM enterprise-wide — nine resorts, two national parks.

Brand Manager & Creative Director

2018–2022
Killington Mountain Resort & Pico · Killington, VT
  • Translated brand strategy into a working marketing funnel — partnered with media and performance agencies including Deutsch LA, Love Media, and Lift Marketing against $500K–$1M in annual digital spend, deploying the budget, shipping the assets each stage required, and evolving the campaign on what the numbers said.
  • Reclaimed "Beast of the East" — repositioned the largest resort in the East as a four-season destination: +17% winter revenue (2015–2019) · +14% season-pass visits · +285% mountain biking.
  • Led the team behind "Fast & Fearless," the FIS World Cup campaign built around five US Ski Team athletes including Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin. Crowds climbed 30K to 39K in three years. NSAA Best Overall Marketing Campaign and Best Use of Video.
  • Created "King of Spring," a seasonal brand character across nine films over nine years. The 2016 breakout, Old Man Winter: ~175K organic views (150K in the first 24 hours), $0 paid. Featured in POWDER.
  • Ran creative for a year-round event calendar — FIS Alpine World Cup, three seasons of Winter Dew Tour, the Spartan Race World Championship, MAXXIS Eastern States Cup, Brewfest, Cooler in the Mountains, the Stage Race, and spring culture events.
  • Co-founded and published 4241 and kept it running a decade — a 152-page print magazine, 1M+ copies distributed, ~75 films, and a 4.9-star podcast. Self-initiated in-house; it spun out the agency Buttery.

Creative Services & Interactive Manager

2012–2018
Killington Mountain Resort & Pico · Killington, VT
  • Owned brand guidelines and creative production end to end — magazine, print, digital, web, photography, video.
  • Led the creative team and rebuilt the workflow to cut production cost.

Interactive Manager

2008–2012
Killington Mountain Resort & Pico · Killington, VT
  • Ran web and interactive from the inside — site strategy, UX, and delivery of web applications wired into mobile apps, digital signage, and resort-wide communications, with agencies and internal dev teams. Hands-on HTML and CMS work across the site and CRM campaigns.

Graphic Designer

2005–2008
Copper Mountain Resort (POWDR) · Copper, CO
  • Print and digital design for a major resort brand.

Core skills

Creative

Brand strategy · Creative & art direction · Campaign development · Paid media & funnel strategy · Media agency partnership · Spend allocation & performance iteration · Content strategy · Copywriting · Photography & video direction · Motion / postproduction · Editorial design & publishing

Systems & Leadership

Brand governance systems · Creative operations · AI product prototyping · Digital strategy · Change management · Stakeholder & team leadership · Agency / freelancer management

Tooling

Anthropic API · React · TypeScript · Supabase · Netlify · GitHub · Polotno SDK · Adobe Creative Suite · DAM systems

Education

BFA, Design Communication — Minor: Illustration & Web Design · Texas Tech University, 2003
Study Abroad — Lorenzo de' Medici, Florence, Italy