A short version, mostly true.

I'm Rachel. I'm a marketer who builds — mostly AI systems for Dutch SMEs and in-house marketing teams who need their work to actually compound rather than start from scratch every Monday. Rachel Elz Studios is the consulting practice. I'm based in Haarlem (the small canal-y one, not the New York one).

How I got here

I spent the first decade of my career in marketing — agencies, then in-house, then the kind of senior-IC role where you've stopped doing the work and started watching dashboards. I never actually left marketing. I just kept layering more underneath it: behavioral science first, then AI systems, then the kind of build-it-yourself ops most marketers don't have time for.

The blunt version of the behavioral-science layer: I took a 50% pay cut to retrain in it. The honest version: it taught me why marketing actually works (or doesn't), and I've never run a campaign the same way since.

Then AI showed up and made the systems part — the stuff that used to take a small team a month — into something one careful person could build in an afternoon. Stitching those three layers together is, more or less, the whole job now.

What I'm working on

Three things at the moment.

• Orellis — the consulting practice. AI and marketing-ops audits, plus 10-day pilots for Dutch SMEs and in-house teams. Mostly recruitment, professional services, and marketing functions where the work is human-shaped but the admin is eating everyone alive.
• Pouch — a recall-alerts service for parents, built with my two sisters (one in Boulder, one in Maine). It started because I read a furniture-recall headline, panicked about a baby gate, and realized there was no proper way to find out.
• Writing — mostly LinkedIn for now. A newsletter is in the queue but not ready.

Where I'm based

Haarlem, Netherlands, by way of Boston, London, and one slightly chaotic year in Auckland. There's a husband, two small kids, and a permanent low-grade pile of laundry. I work mostly from home, in the gaps between daycare drop-off and the 5pm dinner deadline. Sometimes that means I'm whispering into AirPods on a walk because the baby finally fell asleep in the pram.