HERMEUS: Building the World’s Fastest Aircraft
I spent the lion’s share of my early career at Hermeus, an aerospace startup building high-speed, remotely piloted aircraft.
As Creative Producer, I helped shape how the company showed its progress to the world. I produced video, photography, merchandise, event collateral, internal communications, recruiting content, and brand assets. For most of my tenure, I did this as part of a lean, two- person Marketing team.
The center of our brand was media: tactile, high-energy photo and video captured on the factory floor as aircraft were being built, tested, and flown. That work helped communicate the qualities Hermeus wanted to be known for: speed, scale, grit, technical credibility, and the people behind the hardware.
Over time, I built a deep catalog of media used across social, recruiting, investor relations, government affairs, internal communications, leadership decks, event displays, and company merchandise. Much of the work below was used to help employees, candidates, investors, and government stakeholders understand what Hermeus was building and believe in the pace at which we were building it.
Below is a selection of my work at Hermeus, minus the material I can’t show because of government or company restrictions.
The Quarterhorse Program
One program. Four aircraft. Each aircraft building upon the lessons of the last.
For the Quarterhorse program, I produced photo and video content around major build and flight milestones, including first flight campaigns at Edwards Air Force Base and Spaceport New Mexico.
My role included planning shoots, coordinating with communications leadership, working with executives and engineers, managing contractors and small production crews, and editing final videos for internal and external use.
These videos were used across social, recruiting, investor updates, government stakeholder conversations, internal comms, and leadership presentations. The goal was simple: make Hermeus’ technical progress visible, credible, and exciting.
For most shoots, I was the sole camera operator and editor. For major flight milestones, I helped assemble and coordinate outside crews, manage shifting test schedules, keep communication open between engineers and videographers, and ensure captured footage cleared the necessary approvals.
As editor, I worked through multiple rounds of feedback with communications and executive stakeholders to create videos that showed real progress, rallied employees around their success, shut down haters (very important!) , and instilled faith in our investors and government partners.
Recruiting
Recruiting content was one of the clearest ways our media helped the company build brand awareness.
I produced videos and social content that showed what it felt like to work at Hermeus: fast timelines, real ownership, hard technical problems, and a direct connection between individual work and aircraft progress.
Before producing employee spotlights, I interviewed people across teams and experience levels to understand why they joined and why they stayed. From that I gathered two main takeaways: 1) people wanted to solve a unique problem, and 2)they valued the ownership they had over meaningful technical work.
Those insights guided the recruiting content I produced. I focused on telling first-hand stories from employees sharing the empowerment they felt to move fast, make decisions (and mistakes), and take technical ownership over their systems.
Our recruiting teams used this content to support candidate conversations, hiring pushes, events, and social campaigns.
You can find more employee spotlights on Hermeus’ LinkedIn.
A major part of my role was documenting technical progress as it happened. I regularly captured hardware builds, aircraft integration, engine work, factory activity, test campaigns, and other milestones across the company. Some of this content was public-facing, but much of it was internal or shared selectively with investors, government stakeholders, and friends of the company.
This work gave Hermeus a consistent visual record of progress, helping technical teams, business development, recruiting, executives, and employees point to concrete evidence of what the company was building and how quickly it was moving. It also helped nontechnical audiences understand complex aerospace work through visuals: close-up factory footage, engineering conversations, process documentation, b-roll, photos, infographics, and presentation assets.
Technical Milestones
BRANDING & Graphic design
Building the Hermeus brand meant creating graphics, trade show experiences, and content that felt both technical and visually interesting while remaining aligned with our brand. Below are examples of work created for events and internal communications initiatives.
MERCHANDISE
I oversaw merchandise operations at Hermeus, managing the process from concept through delivery. This included our yearly company gift.
That included working with designers, selecting seasonally-appropriate, high quality products, managing vendors, reviewing proofs, tracking budgets and invoices, coordinating approvals, and distributing merchandise to roughly 300 employees across four office locations.
Some merchandise was built around culture: cool and swaggy pieces employees would actually want to wear, use, and keep. Other pieces were tied to specific messaging objectives: celebrating milestones, highlighting upcoming aircraft progress, supporting events, or reinforcing the company’s visual identity. Our design choices sprouted from there.
