A car into acultural moment.
The Model 3's first public showing had to reach the mainstream — an audience that buys meaning, not spec sheets. I led Tesla's presence at the LA Auto Show, where the Model 3 met the public for the first time.
generated
captured
led
value
By 2017, Tesla had won the early adopters — the technologists, the environmentalists, the people who'd wait years for a car. The Model 3 was the company's bid for everyone else, and everyone else wasn't going to be persuaded by battery chemistry.
The brand challenge was translation, not awareness: taking a product the faithful already understood and making it feel obvious — and desirable — to an audience that had never considered an electric car, at the exact moment the company needed to reach a much wider market.
My role centered on brand experience and partnerships for the Northern California region. Two projects stand out: leading Tesla's presence at the LA Auto Show — the Model 3's first public showing — and authoring the retail showroom experience playbook that rolled out across the US.
Category-defining products still need cultural permission. The LA Auto Show was demand creation at the largest scale I've operated — but the mechanics were the same ones I use with early-stage companies: find the frame the audience already cares about, design the experience that proves it, and make the brand mean something beyond its spec sheet.
It's also where I learned that experience is narrative — a delivery, a debut, a showroom walk-through can carry positioning more convincingly than any campaign.
