tr3 Design - Tom Rooney III

"The Story of Valken Sports"

Creative Director

2021 – 2025

Valken Sports was a premier manufacturer, designer, and global distributor of action sports gear, specializing in the paintball, airsoft, and tactical defense markets. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Swedesboro, New Jersey, the company operated as a high-volume, "one-stop-shop" vendor servicing thousands of independent fields, retail shops, and international distributors until its closure in late 2025.

As Creative Director, I served as the primary creative voice for the global brand, steering brand strategy and multi-channel design across print, digital, and social media. Navigating a high-velocity environment, I led a cross-functional creative team to chart brand consistency and strategic alignment across all global touchpoints.

Within my time at Valken I had owned, built, or restructured: brand identity, catalog production and distribution, five eCommerce storefronts across two continents, Proposition 65 compliance systems, packaging across multiple product lines, cross-departmental QA, a product line bifurcation that prevented a recall before a single unit shipped, and 100+ documented problem-solution frameworks.

While the sudden closure of Valken caused the loss of access to much of the media I had produced, the methods born from the madness that was Valken still exist. The mindset is all here.

Some of the adventures that forged it are in the Chapters below... part case study, part odyssey.

METRICS

93.3%

Of a change-resistant legacy dealer base converted to digital... driven by print.

Frequent Buyers

Company-wide revenue driver, built from a few lines of dormant, forgotten code.

The Oracle of NetSuite

Outsourced print cost, on catalogs a press that size was never built to produce.

Whatever It Takes

"Whatever It Takes"

Creative Direction Adobe Creative Suite Brand Strategy Digital Asset Management Print Production Team Leadership

Every book needs a cover, and every story needs a beginning. The story that eventually led to the successful migration of >90% of a historically resistant, traditional B2B client base to a new platform during its developmental phase via print marketing produced by a temperamental, auction-bought, wide-body commercial production printer that had been nicknamed “The Beast” began with the creation of a cover.

Chapter

"Peeling Back the Layers"

Packaging Design Prepress Asset Forensics Cross-Functional Collaboration Spatial Data Mapping Linguistic Mediation Technical Troubleshooting

While the Catalogs & Flyers were doing their print-to-digital bridge building, a mystery involving distorted graphics on newly printed Valken paintball boxes arose that led me both across the globe and to full ownership of packaging at Valken.

Chapter

"Red, White & SKU"

Design Systems Architecture Visual Psychology & Neuroscience Brand Hierarchy & Scalability Visual Rhyming Advanced Color Theory Constraint-Driven Problem Solving

A legacy brand asset. A corporate mandate. A multi-colored battlefield... Applying the medieval Law of Tincture and Old Norse marking principles to resolve modern retail shelf clutter amidst a complete redesign of our entire paintball packaging portfolio while endearing ourselves to our B2B Dealers along the way.

Chapter

"Frequent Buyers"

Multivariate Creative Strategy Visual Archetype Mapping E-commerce Onboarding Funnels Data-Driven Design Data-Driven Merchandising Variable Data Printing (VDP) Architecture

In the world of fine tailoring, a garment must serve the client’s exact environment. Our core B2B "Dealers" had a very specific, deeply ingrained posture and needed to be draped in copious amounts of fitted paper marketing deliverables to entice them across "The Phygital Bridge."

Chapter

"The Oracle of NetSuite"

ERP Architecture Process Mapping Qualitative User Research Omnichannel B2B Marketing Cohort Analysis HTML/CSS Custom Email Design

The digital gods of enterprise architecture speak in fractured language: cryptic, multi-layered dialects of database logic, ancient code, and human sentiment. The sacred art of the query transformed a blind supplicant into a translational supreme high priest of Valken's marketing temple... broadcasting an inescapable marketing message through the "Binaric Aether".

Chapter

"The Story of Tom Rooney III"

Designer, Director, Strategist, Storyteller

CARTOGRAPHER: noun - 1. a professional mapmaker. 2. One who designs, creates, and updates both physical and digital maps, blending data and graphic design to accurately represent geography, spatial information, and physical or cultural features.

Many companies try to scale their marketing and design on incomplete maps... a state of organizational Terra Incognita, where audience insight is missing, brand strategy runs on guesswork, and inter-departmental misunderstandings cause the entire ship to drift off course. Without a unified "why" to navigate by, creative teams end up guessing the destination: marketing builds on assumptions, design works without context, and resources get spent chasing Fata Morgana.

In ancient maps, cartographers labeled unexplored territories with a warning: Here Be Monsters.

For most companies, these "monsters" are the frustrating, undefined marketing and messaging problems that live in the gaps between departments. They are the systemic friction points everyone avoids.

That is exactly where I go... to the farthest edges, where the data thins and the lines fade.

I venture into those undefined spaces to hunt down the root cause of misalignments in messaging, production, data, and systems: charting a clear path forward, and building the infrastructure that prevents those monsters from returning.

Because every monster on every map was only ever a coastline no one had charted yet...

I've been navigating the waters of marketing and design for more than a half dozen years: charting courses for businesses, municipalities and startups... helping them tell their story across print, web, email, marketing, social campaigns, and video/motion graphics.

I am looking to drop anchor with a new crew full-time as a Senior Designer or Creative Director where I can build and guide the next generation of visual storytellers. But whether you have a permanent seat at your table, or you are currently lost at sea and just need a good map to find your way back to port, let’s talk. I'm always ready to help chart your next course.