- Industry: Hospitality Design, Architecture, Interior Design
- Location: Palm Harbor, Florida
- Founder: Jacki Arena, hospitality designer since 1992
- Vertical fit: Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC), hospitality
- Objective: Build and sustain a marketing presence that keeps JAI top of mind with developers, hospitality groups, and referral partners across the multi-year cycles that define AEC.
Jacki Arena has designed hospitality spaces since 1992 — more than 85 projects from Florida to the Northeast. She's a recognized leader in her field. And she's worked with Vers for a decade.
For any firm trying to understand what long-term marketing actually looks like in a relationship-driven industry, that last sentence is the whole case study.
The challenge: in AEC, memory is the entire purchase.
Hospitality development moves slowly. A developer starts conversations about a hotel. The design team gets shortlisted. Pre-construction, financing, entitlement, groundbreaking — three or four years can pass before a project opens.
And while that project crawls through its cycle, the next developer is quietly deciding who to bring in on the next one. That decision is made on who they've been hearing from. Whose work has shown up in their inbox. Whose name keeps circulating before an RFP ever goes out.
Most firms try to build that presence in bursts — a website every five years, a push when a project wraps, a LinkedIn post when someone remembers. The result fades between efforts, and the firm rebuilds credibility from scratch with every new developer. The math is brutal: a developer who heard your name once two years ago isn't thinking about you now. A developer who's seen substantive work from you every month for two years is a completely different prospect.
When Jacki first came to Vers, the question wasn't whether she was good. It was whether the right people would keep hearing from her — right when the next project started to form.
The Vers approach: an engine, not a project.
There's a version of marketing that gets done once and hoped for — a website, a brand refresh, a deck update. Those have value. They're not an engine.
An engine runs every month. It shows up in front of the developers, hospitality groups, and referral partners Jacki wants to work with, without her chasing each one. It gives her something real to say to her network month after month, not just when a project wraps. And it operates at a level that signals she belongs in the conversations she's trying to be in.
Over a decade, that's meant two full brand builds and everything in between.
Brand, twice. In 2015 we rebranded Jacki Arena Interiors from the ground up — mission, strategy, logo, and website — and turned the firm into JAI: Design That Makes a Difference. When the business grew into a curated platform in 2024, we evolved it again into JAI The Collective: new positioning and visual language for the platform model, without abandoning the equity she'd built.
Ongoing website and content. Website management, blogs, social, video, and print — a steady stream of project storytelling, design philosophy, and industry commentary tied to what hospitality buyers are actually thinking about. Real substance, not templates or blasts. It gives Jacki a reason to show up in her network's world every month, and it gives that network something to pass along.
Ecosystem branding. Brand and creative work for the individual partners and projects inside the collective, so the whole thing presents as one coordinated operation, not a loose network.
The result: a partnership, not a project.
"Vers's unique gift is getting to the heart of the brand, which is then carried out through all aspects of the creative products they deliver. They turned my hospitality design firm into JAI: Design That Makes a Difference. Justin Price and his team are incredibly talented and pour their heart and soul into each and every brand they work with." Jacki Arena, Founder, JAI
A decade in, Jacki keeps Vers because it works. The content keeps her positioned at the level of work she wants to win, the brand has grown every time the business has, and the collective keeps expanding.
That's the difference between hiring an agency for a project and building a marketing function that compounds. In a relationship-driven industry, that difference is the entire game.
If your firm has grown on relationships and you're ready to build the infrastructure that keeps those relationships forming — even in rooms you're not in — that's the conversation to have.
let's talk.
let's talk.
let's talk.
let's talk.
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