Voices in Jessica's Head
Fifteen years branding products. This time the product is a person. A persona designed like a brand — and performed.
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The brief: sell second-hand clothes. Nobody clicks a sustainability post, so I built a persona instead of a campaign — archetype, voice, wardrobe, a system that holds across thirteen episodes. Every piece Jessica wears is for sale from the SPARK + REBEL archive.
Same craft I use on any brand at work. The only difference is that this identity has a body, and I'm in it.
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Creator, writer, performer — every voice. Plus direction, wardrobe, wigs, shot list and edit. I write all the songs in Suno, so each episode has its own original track.
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Thirteen episodes, one a month since 2025, written, performed and cut solo. The character did the commercial job: it opened a new market for SPARK + REBEL, putting the archive in front of performers and costume people instead of eco-shoppers. And it did a second job nobody briefed: it made me an actor. Thirteen episodes of playing five people is the training you can't buy — and it's what sent me to improv, stand-up, and Margie Haber.
The Challenge
Two briefs. One spokesperson.
SPARK + REBEL needed fresh ways to sell clothes — every piece is one-of-one, so there's no catalogue to run twice. Sparkpick, the parent brand, needed people to care about eco fashion and mindful consumption without being lectured about it.
Two briefs, same shape: both needed someone to carry them. Jessica became the spokesperson for both.
The Story
EDINBURGH, AUGUST 2025
My friend Ksu and I went to the Fringe in Scotland. Three thousand shows, most of them one person on a small stage with nothing but a point of view. I sat through a few comedy hours and had the thought that reroutes a life: I could do this. Maybe not better — but not much worse. Scotland lit the fuse; the material came from years of therapy, which is where I learned to hear the voices as separate people instead of one flat verdict about myself.
The Brand Pillars
Comedy
The series is written to be funny first. Nothing is sold straight — the joke is the medium, and if a scene doesn't earn a laugh, it doesn't ship.
Fashion
The series is a celebration of fashion and styling. Each personality has her own design system and personal brand — palette, silhouette, hair, attitude — all built from the SPARK + REBEL archive.
Psychology
Transactional analysis is the spine: the critic in your head, played out loud. Other subjects come and go — mindful consumption, self-expression, dating — but they all run through the same five voices.
Part 1 — Building characters
The Voices
Jessica isn't invented from nothing — she's assembled from six people. California girls, or what I thought they were from the outside: sun, candy, endless confidence. Liza Minnelli for the theatricality and the dance, bubbly on the surface with real technique underneath. Paris Hilton for the blonde everyone thinks they've clocked in four seconds; I'd played her before and liked the fit. Fleabag for the look to camera and the brutal honesty. Meredith Monk for singing with no words and refusing to pick a genre. Céline Dion for total commitment to a look, in daylight, for no occasion. But first and foremost she's built from the voices — the critical ones that stop us being happy and being ourselves. Jessica's only superpower is that she says them out loud.
The Framework
The committee isn't a random crowd. It's built on transactional analysis — Eric Berne's model of three ego-states: Parent (borrowed from other people), Adult (here, now, deciding) and Child (replayed from being small). I cast five: Mom (“What will people think?”) and Grandma (“Do not trust anyone.”) as the two critical parents, Jessica as the adult who has to referee them, the Kid as the free child, and the Teenager as the rebellious one. Each gets a wig, a posture and one sentence the others would never say — which is what stops them blurring into one nagging noise.
Parent, Adult, Child — and the five characters cast into them, with the one line each owns. On the live site this banner is animated. A writing tool, not clinical advice.
The Monkey
I got sick at the Fringe. Fevers at two in the morning, and metal beer kegs rolling over the cobblestones below until five. Every night I dreamed the same thing: a wind-up monkey clapping its cymbals — not frightening, just relentless and impossible to switch off.
The critical voice isn't a monster. It's a toy with a key in its back. The monkey opens the series now.
Part 2 — How it’s built
Decision 01 — Play all of them.
Overview
The easy version is a sketch with a cast. I play every voice instead, because the point is that they're all her — and all me. One face, six wigs, six postures, six ways of holding a sentence. It's harder to shoot and it's the whole idea: you can't outsource the argument in your own head.
Tradeoff
Every scene becomes a continuity problem and a solo shoot day. I lose the ensemble energy a real cast would bring, and gain the one thing a cast can't do — the audience recognizing that the bully and the dreamer have the same face.
Decision 02 — Train like it's a craft, not a hobby.
Overview
I took scene study and on-camera audition technique at Margie Haber Studio and improv at National Comedy Theater, and kept going with dance. The technique shows up as restraint: earlier episodes push the joke, later ones trust the pause. Improv is why the voices talk over each other the way real ones do.
Tradeoff
Training is slow and unglamorous next to shooting more episodes. It also raised my own bar mid-series, which means the first episodes now look like the first episodes.
Decision 03 — The wardrobe carries the exposition.
Tradeoff
Thirteen episodes released in 2026, written, shot and cut solo — including Greenwashed, the one that says out loud what the eco-fashion industry sells and what it actually does.
Episode 1.”The attack”
Jessica steps into the spotlight ready for her style moment… and her mom's voice hijacks the show. A glamorous entrance spirals into a battle between self-doubt and self-expression.
Episode 2.”Relax!”
Jessica's running on fumes when her inner voices stage a full intervention. A to-do-list spiral becomes a tug-of-war between productivity and rest.
Episode 4.”Greenwashed”
Jessica's riding high on an "eco-friendly" shopping spree until her inner voices crash the party with hard truths about marketing buzzwords.
Episode 5.”Hot Date”
A date, and five inner voices fighting over what she should wear. The real secret: confidence is the hottest thing you can wear.
Episode 6.”Pretty Scarry”
This Halloween, Jessica faces her dark side — and discovers her anger isn't the monster she feared. A spooky night becomes a showdown with her own shadow, and a reminder that the scariest thing isn't the costume.
Episode 9.”Age Limit”
At 40, Jessica walks into dance class and gets handed an expiration date. So she stops asking permission and starts taking up space — because rage, styled correctly, is just confidence with better posture.
The Result
Thirteen episodes, one a month. SPARK + REBEL picked up 6K+ new followers and the orders followed — Jessica sells clothes in a way no product shot ever did. But the result I didn't plan for: I started taking acting classes.
What this project led to
Playing Jessica was a marketing tactic. It became a door — improv at National Comedy Theater, then stand-up, then on-camera acting at Margie Haber Studio. It also turned out to be healing: you can't be ruled by a voice you've done an impression of. That's the thread I'm still pulling — I'm now vibe-coding mobile healing apps with Claude. Same instinct, different medium.