A T-shirt has limited room for an argument. There is the front, the back, perhaps a label that nobody reads until the washing goes wrong. Beth Doane gave that small surface a considerable assignment: carry a child’s view of the world, help protect a rainforest, and persuade a customer to care about the connection.
Her apparel brand Raintees, launched in 2008, used children’s artwork and linked purchases to planting trees. The idea brought together two parts of fashion that can live remarkably separate lives: the attractive thing on the hanger and the conditions that made it possible. Doane had worked in fashion importing and distribution. She wanted more say over what happened before the garment reached the shop.
Today, she is co-founder and CEO of Main+Rose, a creative communications agency working with brands, destinations and governments. Its assignments extend into sport, tourism, entertainment and national pavilions. The distance from a child’s drawing to a country’s communications brief is considerable. Across that distance, Doane has kept returning to a practical question: what makes somebody pay attention, and what should happen once they do?
The label behind the label
Doane started her first company at 22. Through Andira International, she brought European fashion brands to the United States. It was a useful introduction to the machinery behind an appealing product: distribution, positioning, manufacturing and the work of getting a buyer to notice something new.
It also exposed her to labor abuses and environmental damage in the industry. Raintees became her answer. Rather than continue only as an intermediary for other people’s designs, she could establish terms for a label of her own, including how it was produced and what each sale supported.
The line launched at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Los Angeles in 2008. Its designs incorporated drawings by children in developing countries, including rainforest communities. Organic cotton, tree planting and school support were part of the proposition. A customer could wear the artwork; the purchase connected to a place beyond the wardrobe.
There was a pleasing reversal in that arrangement. Fashion usually asks a designer to tell everyone else what the world should look like. Here, children supplied pictures of the world they already inhabited. Doane’s commercial job was to give those pictures an audience. A garment could introduce its wearer to somebody whose life would otherwise remain outside the frame.
Three children get the page
The drawings were not confined to fabric. In 2012, Doane published From the Jungle: Stories and Original Art from Children Living in Rainforests. The book brought young readers into rainforest life through three children, Winnie, Mariela and Pablo, and their original artwork.
Its premise gave the children room to describe their surroundings and the demands placed on the resources around them. The environmental question became easier to approach through particular people. A distant forest acquires a different meaning when somebody can tell you what it looks like from home.
The book carried the same purchase-linked promise: a tree planted for every copy sold. Its forty pages also offered another use for the material Doane had encountered while working in Central and South America. A visit could become a relationship, a drawing could travel, and a business could help distribute the result.
There is an editorial decision running through both projects. Who gets to speak? In the book, children’s names and pictures were central to the telling. Doane supplied a route to readers. It is an early example of the kind of work that later became her profession: finding a story already present in an organization or community, then deciding how another audience might enter it.
A business built around the telling
Raintees brought Doane consulting work from brands interested in sustainability. Advising on production and impact widened into advising on branding, marketing and design. She had found another business inside the first one: helping people explain why their work deserved attention.
Main+Rose was founded in 2013 with Kelly Gibbons. Their agency grew across the United States and the Middle East, taking on the research, identity, campaigns and communications that sit behind a public reputation. Doane’s responsibilities have included creative direction and brand strategy; the agency now identifies her as founder and CEO.
Her experience also includes Parlor, a marketplace for freelancers that she co-founded and later helped lead through a private acquisition. That venture belongs alongside the agency and the clothing line in understanding her career. She has worked on the business being sold, the people doing the work, and the story used to bring the two together.
Branding can sound like a profession devoted to adjectives. The less decorative part involves choosing an audience, deciding what matters to it and making those choices visible across many ordinary encounters. A website, an announcement and an event cannot each invent a different organization. The work requires enough consistency for somebody to recognize the same enterprise when it turns up again.
“Tell your story”Beth Doane, on building a personal brand
The passport is part of the job
Travel has been a substantial part of Doane’s working life. By her 2018 travel interview, she had photographed her way through more than eighty countries, often making portraits with her phone. A phone is a modest piece of equipment for such an extensive itinerary. It also leaves fewer objects between the photographer and the person being photographed.
Her travel writing grew from wanting to share places and cultures she had encountered. Conservation initiatives and properties committed to sustainability became particular interests. She has contributed to publications including Forbes, Inc and Darling, carrying her work into forms that allow more room than a campaign headline.
Asked about a favorite destination in 2018, she singled out Oman, remembering Muscat, more remote areas, the food and the welcome. The answer was specific enough to be useful. An itinerary is a list of places; affection usually requires a few details.
Her professional circle has extended into the Pacific Council on International Policy, the Young Entrepreneur Council and advisory work for the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights Project. Those connections sit naturally beside a career spent translating between audiences. A brand strategist working across borders has to consider what a place means to the people who live there as well as what it promises to visitors.
When the client is a place
In July 2024, Main+Rose won a brief from Abu Dhabi Entertainment Company. The assignment covered brand strategy, visual identity, digital marketing and social media, including work for the company and its different operations. ADEC’s portfolio included Zayed Sports City, Zayed Sports Academy and the Active brand.
This was a different communications problem from introducing a new product. An organization could already be responsible for places and experiences that people knew, while its own identity remained less familiar. Doane described the task as bringing ADEC into greater public view and expressing the community around its sport and entertainment activities.
The same year, she and Gibbons celebrated the launch of Main+Rose’s Riyadh operations with a luncheon at Flamingo Room Riyadh. The gathering brought together female leaders from their clients and wider network. Discussion ranged across women’s roles, tourism, art, heritage and culture. The agency’s international ambitions had acquired a local table and a guest list.
Such work calls for attention to the difference between an institution’s internal vocabulary and the experience of the people it hopes to reach. A resident, a visitor and a prospective partner may encounter the same place for entirely different reasons. The communications need to make room for all three without making the place sound as though it was assembled by committee.
A country needs a coherent invitation
For Expo 2025 Osaka, Main+Rose was selected with Trivandi to handle media and marketing for the USA Pavilion. The remit included bringing its program to Japanese and international audiences. Architecture, technology, arts, cultural performances and travel all belonged within the invitation.
A pavilion gives a communications agency an unusually literal version of its job. People must decide to enter. Once inside, they encounter an experience; outside, they carry away pictures, impressions and stories. The name over the door may be familiar, but the particular reasons to walk through it still need to be communicated.
In 2026, Main+Rose announced another assignment alongside Trivandi: marketing, media and communications for the USA Pavilion at Expo 2027 Belgrade. The announced work spans public relations, the website, digital and social channels, photography and content. The forthcoming Expo’s theme brings sport and music together under Play for Humanity.
September 2026 also brought a change in the founders’ working arrangement. Gibbons joined Trivandi as executive vice president for the United States after more than a decade building Main+Rose. Doane’s agency now presents her as its CEO. Their shared history continues to matter to a firm whose recent assignments have involved the company Gibbons has joined.
The drawings still matter
Alongside the large international projects, Doane has recently shared Main+Rose’s identity work for Branches Community Projects, which supports community-led initiatives through infrastructure, funding and partnerships. She has also shared work involving Miami’s Bath Club and the yacht company IYC. The portfolio places nonprofit identity, local heritage and luxury in the same working week.
That breadth makes her original proposition more interesting to revisit. Sustainability was built into the transaction at Raintees. In agency work, the relationship between a story and an outcome has to be established afresh for each client. The practical challenge is to find something specific enough to communicate and substantial enough to survive attention.
Doane’s own account of her temperament is unusually plain. “I always look for what’s possible,” she has said. She makes lists of tasks, ideas, inspiration and ambitions. In an industry that sells polish, a list remains a reassuringly unglamorous tool. Somebody still has to remember what happens on Tuesday.
Her advice to younger entrepreneurs has emphasized persistence, good partners and building a team. Those priorities fit a career that has moved through products, publishing and client work. The recurring aspiration is to make business useful beyond the sale. Raintees gave that aspiration a visible form: a child’s drawing, a shirt and a tree. The assignments have become larger. The need for a connection somebody can understand remains.