Wendy Chan, Founder & Strategist at INBRND

There’s a moment in many people’s careers when they realize they’ve done meaningful work — but struggle to explain it in a way that fully captures who they are. That tension between identity, language, and visibility is exactly what drives Wendy Chan, Founder & Strategist of INBRND. Through her signature framework, Career as a Brand System™, Wendy helps people connect the dots between their experiences, strengths, and stories to build careers with greater clarity and intention. In this conversation, she shares lessons on reinvention, self-advocacy, career breaks, and what it means to build a life and career that feels truly aligned.

1) What is the last thing you were curious about? 

The last thing I was curious about was how people translate who they are into language that other people can understand.

I recently led a workshop called Career as a Brand System™, and what stayed with me most was watching people realize they already had expertise — they just did not always have the words, structure, or visibility to express it. That made me even more curious about how identity, language, and opportunity are connected.

I think curiosity is often the beginning of a new system. You notice a pattern, ask why it keeps happening, and eventually it becomes something you can teach.

I have also learned that curiosity can become the beginning of a book. I am currently writing a memoir called The Language I Leave You — and that question is part of what it is trying to answer.

2) We’re a non-profit focused on empowering women. Could you share which significant female figures have impacted your career and how they’ve shaped who you are today?

One female figure who deeply shaped me in my early twenties was Brené Brown. Her books gave me language for parts of my life I did not yet know how to name — belonging, shame, courage, vulnerability, and what it means to dare greatly before you feel fully ready.

At that stage of my life, I was still learning how to understand my own story. I had ambition, but I also had a lot of uncertainty around where I belonged and how much of myself I was allowed to bring into the rooms I wanted to be in. Her work helped me see that courage was not the absence of fear. It was the willingness to be seen while still becoming.

That changed how I thought about leadership and career. It made me realize that the language we have for our inner lives affects how we move through the outer world. If you cannot name what you are experiencing, it becomes harder to advocate, choose, heal, or grow.

Beyond Brené Brown, many of the women who shaped me were not always formal mentors. Some were managers, peers, community leaders, writers, or women I watched from a distance who gave me permission to take myself seriously.

The women who impacted me most taught me different things: how to speak with clarity, how to hold a room, how to advocate without apologizing, and how to build a life that does not only look successful on paper but actually feels aligned.

As an Asian American woman, I did not always grow up seeing many examples of women who were both ambitious and emotionally honest, strategic and creative, soft and powerful. So when I encountered women who embodied that range, it mattered. They helped me understand that leadership does not have to look like becoming louder than everyone else. Sometimes it looks like becoming clearer.

I believe you cannot become what you do not see. Seeing women model different versions of ambition, courage, creativity, and leadership gave me permission to imagine a wider version of my own life.

That is something I try to carry into my own work now — helping women name their value, trust their perspective, and build visible proof of the work they are already doing.

3) Can you tell us what you do as the Founder & Strategist at INBRND for those who are unfamiliar?

INBRND is a strategic platform focused on helping people turn their work into clearer positioning, stronger narratives, and visible proof of expertise.

A lot of people are talented, but their career story is fragmented. They have projects, skills, experiences, and ideas, but they have not connected them into a system that other people can understand. INBRND helps people do that.

My core framework is called Career as a Brand System™. It applies marketing principles to career development: narrative, language, assets, and visibility. In simpler terms: What story defines your work? What ideas do you want to be known for? What proof shows your expertise? And how do you share it in a way that creates opportunity?

I offer workshops, strategic guidance, and content around career positioning, personal brand systems, and professional visibility — especially for people navigating transition, reinvention, or a desire to be seen more clearly.

4) What advice would you give to someone who wants to become a founder of a company?

Start with a real problem you cannot stop thinking about.

I think people sometimes imagine founding as a big dramatic leap, but often it starts more quietly. You notice the same problem again and again. You build a point of view. You test it in public. You help a few people. You refine the language. Then over time, the company starts to reveal itself.

My advice would be: do not wait until everything looks polished to begin. But also do not build only from excitement. Build from evidence. Pay attention to what people ask you for, what conversations keep repeating, what work gives you energy, and where your lived experience gives you unusual insight.

Also, your first version does not need to be your final version. A company is not only something you launch. It is something you keep listening to.

5) Can you share a pivotal moment in your career that significantly shaped your professional journey? What lessons did you learn from it?

A pivotal moment for me was taking a career break after years of moving quickly through roles, launches, and transitions.

At first, stepping away felt scary because so much of my identity had been tied to work. I had been in marketing across industries like hardware, mobility, health tech, and startups, and I was used to proving myself through output. When I slowed down, I had to confront the question underneath everything: Who am I when I am not actively performing competence?

That season changed me. I started writing more. I reflected on the through-line of my career. I realized that the thing I kept doing across every role was helping people and companies find the right language for what they were building.

That insight eventually became part of INBRND. The lesson was that sometimes a pause is not a gap. Sometimes it is where the pattern finally becomes visible.

6) You took a short career break for 6 months to travel and soul search. What did you lose, gain, or have to confront during that time that people don’t usually talk about? What’s something you only understood after slowing down and stepping away from your normal routine?

What people do not always talk about is that a career break can be both freeing and disorienting.

I lost the structure that work gave me. I lost the easy answer to “What do you do?” I spent time moving slowly through places that had no connection to my resume — and that distance turned out to be necessary. I had to sit with uncertainty, which was uncomfortable because I had spent so much of my life trying to be prepared, responsible, and impressive.

But I gained a clearer relationship with myself. I traveled, reflected, wrote, and started paying attention to what I missed and what I did not miss. I realized that I did not just want another title. I wanted a life and career that felt more integrated with the person I was becoming.

The biggest thing I had to confront was how much of my identity had been built around being useful. Slowing down helped me understand that my worth was not only in what I could produce. Ironically, once I stopped forcing clarity, the deeper clarity started to come.

7) Best career advice you've received/heard/read?

One of the best pieces of career advice I have heard is: “If you do not narrate your career, someone else will.”

That idea changed how I think about visibility. It is not about being performative or self-promotional. It is about taking responsibility for the meaning of your work.

You can do excellent work and still be misunderstood if you never explain the pattern, the value, or the point of view behind it. That is especially important for women and people from underrepresented backgrounds, because we are often taught to let the work speak for itself. But work does not always speak clearly on its own. Sometimes we have to give it language.

8) You’re the Programs Co-Chair of the American Advertising Federation San Francisco Bay Area. How has being involved in community spaces or organizations outside of work shaped your personal growth or career in ways you didn’t expect?

Being involved with AAF SF has reminded me that your career is not only built through job titles. It is also built through rooms, relationships, contribution, and service.

I joined because I wanted to be closer to the marketing and creative community in the Bay Area. But it ended up shaping me in a much deeper way. It gave me a space to practice leadership outside of a traditional company structure, to build programming, to meet people across different industries, and to test ideas that mattered to me.

Community work also helped me rebuild confidence during a transitional season. When you are between roles or rethinking your path, it can be easy to feel like you are on the outside of things. Being part of a professional community reminded me that I still had value to contribute.

It also became part of the foundation for INBRND. It showed me that people are hungry for spaces where career, identity, creativity, and strategy can be discussed more honestly.

9) As a woman of the Asian Diaspora, can you walk us through a real conversation or decision where you advocated for yourself, whether that was salary, a promotion, visibility, or even setting boundaries?

One example that comes to mind is around salary, severance, and visibility.

Earlier in my career, I was not always comfortable naming what I wanted. I thought if I worked hard, people would notice and reward it. Over time, I learned that advocacy is not just about asking for more. It is about being able to clearly explain the value you already create.

There was a moment when I had to advocate for compensation that matched the scope of what I was bringing: cross-functional marketing, strategy, execution, and the ability to translate complex products into language customers could understand. I had to prepare the evidence, name the business impact, and speak without shrinking.

I also learned this during moments of transition, including negotiating severance. Those conversations taught me something I still carry: ask for what you want, and settle for what you need. Sometimes self-advocacy is not about getting everything. It is about staying grounded enough to protect your dignity, your stability, and your next chapter.

That was not easy. As an Asian American woman, I had internalized a lot around being agreeable, grateful, and not making things difficult. But I learned that advocating for myself did not make me difficult. It made me clear.

I used to think visibility was cringe. Now I understand it is more expensive to be invisible. When your work is not named, positioned, or seen, other people can underestimate it, misread it, or forget it entirely.

That lesson continues to shape how I support other women. Sometimes the first step is not confidence. Sometimes the first step is language.

10) Is there anything else you'd like to share—whether it's a personal insight, a lesson learned, or something you've experienced—that hasn't come up yet in the questions?

I would share that reinvention does not always look like starting over. Sometimes it looks like finally seeing the pattern in everything you have already done.

One of the hardest things to do is look inward. Looking inward requires heart work. It can mean realizing that some of the beliefs you carried about yourself are not actually true — that you were not behind, not too late, not too much, not lacking direction. Sometimes you were simply waiting for the right language to understand your own life.

At the same time, that process can be incredibly empowering. Because once you slow down enough to listen, you realize you already had many of the answers you needed for your life or your next step. They were not missing. They just needed to be activated.

That is part of the meaning behind INBRND for me: what is within us shapes what becomes visible.

For a long time, my career looked nonlinear from the outside. I worked across hardware, medical devices, mobility, consumer tech, startups, and brand campaigns. But when I looked closer, the through-line was always language: helping people understand why something matters.

That is what I am building now through INBRND. I want more people, especially women, to understand that their career is not just a resume. It is a body of work. It is a story. It is a system. And it can be designed with intention.

I am also writing a memoir called The Language I Leave You. It explores how language shapes every part of a life — love, family, work, identity, belonging, and the way we come to understand ourselves. In many ways, the book is my attempt to do for my own story what I help others do for theirs: find the language, trace the pattern, and leave something that lasts beyond the work itself.

Connect with Wendy on LinkedIn