About
One studio, one line of reasoning. Diagnose before you design. Then build it, and prove it worked.
Brand, digital and AI consulting. Shanghai, working globally.
The studio.
Strategy, design, build and AI sitting in one conversation, so nothing has to be translated at a handover.
- Based
- Shanghai, working globally
- Since
- 2019
- Focus
- Strategy, brand, digital, AI
- Approach
- Diagnose, build, validate
The beginning
Branding was never just a visual problem.
Pulse Branding was founded in 2019 around a simple frustration: businesses were making expensive creative decisions before understanding the people those decisions were meant to influence.
The original question was psychological: why do people prefer one thing over another?
That question led to neuroscience-informed research, Pulse Instinct, customer psychology and a broader way of thinking about brand decisions. Over time the work expanded from strategy into identity, digital experience and now AI systems, but the underlying logic stayed the same: understand before you build.
One system, three material states.
Soul, Body and Brain is not a taxonomy we invented to sound structured. It is the order the work itself moves in: meaning first, then form, then the systems that keep it alive.
Soul, Body and Brain: one continuous form passing through three material states, intuitive and atmospheric, structured and architectural, adaptive and intelligent.
- 01SoulStrategy, positioning, customer psychology and the meaning the business needs to carry.
- 02BodyIdentity, website, motion and the experiences through which customers encounter that meaning.
- 03BrainAI systems, knowledge and agentic workflows that help the business research, decide and operate more intelligently.
Founder
Lareesa Hu
Lareesa Hu founded Pulse Branding in 2019, after more than fifteen years building brands in technology and luxury.
Her work starts with customer psychology. Research into how people actually respond to design became Pulse Instinct, a market intelligence platform built on subconscious preference, and it still shapes how each engagement is scoped. She leads the practice from Shanghai for clients in China and worldwide, is Co-Founder and CMO of the robotics company Robotist, and stays hands-on in delivery, including the agentic systems the work now runs on.
Actual artifacts
The work, not the description of it.
Real artifacts, from every stage of the practice.
From brand psychology to working systems.
Each stage exists because the previous one could not answer the question it was asked.
- 012019 · Brand psychologyPositioning and perception work for founder-led businesses
- 02ResearchPreference testing and audience instruments, later productised as Pulse Instinct
- 03Identity & digitalIdentity systems and the sites that carry them
- 04Product systemsInternal tools and platforms that operate the brand
- 05AI systemsAudits, assistants and agentic workflows that run on the same logic
Start here
Run the free brand and growth audit.
Submit a site address. You get a written read of where attention, trust and conversion are leaking, and which workstreams would fix it.
- Public pages only. No access to your analytics is needed.
- A written finding for each leak, with its evidence.
- No obligation. The recommendation names the smallest next step.
Book an alignment call
Two lines and the studio comes back with times.