About Walter

Thank you for stopping by. If you're looking to increase the effectiveness and value of your brand, I recommend heading over to Honesty's website. Here you'll find more about me and things I do outside of branding.

Work

I've spent much of my career in branding, professional creativity, and helping business leaders and entrepreneurs to communicate in clear and meaningful ways. My experience spans tech, business, philosophy, communication, and design, all of which have influenced my approach to branding. Branding has been my main occupation for the past twenty years, and I've run my agency, Honesty, since 2009.

Honesty is perhaps best known for the rebranding and massive growth of the youth mobile brand Halebop from 2010-2016, for which we were awarded the Titanium Prize for best long-term brand building and the Golden Egg Award for the film concept.

I also get a lot of questions about LYKO's rebranding and growth from 2018 to 2022, as the effectiveness numbers were extraordinary and the strategy unorthodox for the category. LYKO's "Your Beauty Playground" concept has a special place in my professional heart, and you can read more about it on the Honesty website.

Leveling The Playing Field for Small Businesses

While creating breakthrough brands for big corporations remains rewarding, I'm investing in ways to help smaller companies build their brands in an accessible and affordable way. The goal is to provide tools that would typically require large enterprise budgets and do my part to level the playing field.

Philosophy

My interest in philosophy is quite practical. Much of it is centered around developing useful "software for the mind"–ways of thinking that enable me to live a better life.

...which begs the question, "What is a better life?" You can read more about that and other topics in the Philosophy section.

Health, Movement, and "Cat Training"

Being able to move well is a more significant part of my professional output and overall quality of life than I first gave it credit for. I decided that I wanted to move like a cat when I was 60 and started exploring yoga, movement, animal flow, TA, pilates, acrobatics, breathwork, and meditation. All combined, I refer to it as "Cat Training," for lack of a better term (plus it keeps my eyes on the prize). I practice daily and do small classes, mainly for Honesty clients.

I'm not big on watching sports, but I like playing them. I've been all over the place with soccer, basketball, ice hockey, judo, wing chun, BJJ, wakeboarding, and even baseball for a short while. The ones where I really got in deep were basketball and wakeboarding. And I love skiing.

Quitting Alcohol for Fun and Profit

I stopped drinking alcohol by mistake in June of 2022. My doctor said something about that I should not combine a medicine I took with alcohol, and when I realized it was not THAT serious, I had already quit for a couple of months and felt something very strange. I felt 20 years younger. I literally felt like I had been shot up with some magical potion, and it turned out that I had – testosterone. 

Quitting alcohol doubled my testosterone levels over four months (and then doubled again another year later). In year one of zero alcohol, I felt twenty years younger physically (you can read more about it in a separate article if you're interested). The following year, my mind started feeling faster, more creative, and easier to control. In the third year, all emotions became more colorful. The price I thought I would have to pay for this zero-alcohol life in terms of having less fun turned out to be a dividend payout instead. I've never had more fun partying and dancing than now.

Initially, I felt somewhat alone and estranged, but since then, many of my friends and girlfriend have followed suit with similar results. I get a lot of questions about this and will try to answer some of them in the Quitting Alcohol for Fun and Profit post.

Ice Bathing

What started as a stupid meme where I posted myself jumping into an icy lake on Instagram became a steady habit of hundreds of ice baths. While I'm sure there are physical benefits in these icey dips, the mental training is where I've found a treasure chest of value. It's a daily experiment in stoic philosophy where you learn to separate nerve signals from their interpretation. When you learn to control what they mean, many other aspects of life, especially stress-related ones, are also suddenly controllable. I've shared hundreds of these swims and many of my thoughts around them on Instagram and will probably write a bit about it here, too.

Photography

I became interested in photography in my mid-teens. There was something about being able to share with someone how I saw them. My first professional assignment was for the school newspaper when I attended high school in Miami. Or, well, at least they paid for film and development. I've since shot hundreds of thousands of pictures, both privately and professionally. 

Tech and Gear

Technology and gear have always been an obsession of mine. I can't decide if it's a pathological obsession or true love. I can get lost in reviews of things I neither need nor will ever buy, just out of pure fascination. In some ways, I feel that it's as useless as porn is to procreation, but if you ever have a question about the best light, lens, or coffee maker, drop me a note, and I may very well have hours of research on it under my belt. Figuratively speaking.

Boats, Sailing, and the Archipelago

The sea has always inspired me. I've been sailing since I was a kid, competed in wakeboarding in my late teens, and picked up surfing around the same time. Sailing through the archipelago is one of my favorite things to do. Being on the water reminds me that there is a point of balance where you have optimal use of the wind. It's not too relaxed, not to strict, there is a point in between. It ties nicely into how we navigate chaos and control our daily lives.

I've always said I'll captain a garbage collection boat in the archipelago when I retire. To that end, I got my Deck Officer Class VIII certificate a few years back. Perhaps I'll name my boat M/S Honesty.

Academic Achievements

I hold a Master of Science in Media Technology and Engineering from Linköping Institute of Technology. I studied business at Lund University (one year at triple speed, but mainly for the infamous student party life in Lund), philosophy at Stockholm University, and communication at Berghs School of Communication in Stockholm. While academic achievement may be a poor proxy for wisdom, it did provide solid scaffolding for pursuing it.