About
We help organizations shape the full arc of their brand - from what they stand for, to how that purpose is felt in the world.
Leadership
Dee Heffernan
Founder | Strategic & Creative Lead
Dee is obsessed with people and human experience. For Christmas, she consistently asked for two things: a swimming pool, and books about psychology, spirituality, really anything that would give her a window into what makes people tick.
After studying Human Development at the University of Chicago, where she also played point and shooting guard for the women’s basketball team, she dove headfirst into sales. Wait. Sales? Yes, the Yellow Pages. The big yellow book.
It makes more sense than it sounds. Dee was born into a family of entrepreneurs and immigrants, a hard-working, thick-skinned line of plumbers, grocers, and manufacturers.
She’s always had the blood of a founder running through her veins. And what yellow pages sales and growing up at tradeshows for her family’s manufacturing company taught her was this: people have short attention spans, trust is build on human connection, and life is too short to not make a difference.
Nearly two decades later, having sat in just about every conceivable seat in sales and marketing departments, Dee opened her doors to the mission-forward work she’d always been drawn toward.
Brands she’s worked with include The University of Chicago, The University of Portland, Human Rights Campaign, Good Dye Young, The American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Sears, Walmart, Publicis Sapient, and many others.
In 2024 she delivered a TEDx talk titled How to Stop Highlight Reel Living — a personal account on approval-seeking and performance-driven burnout. That talk informed the foundation of Dee’s REAL™ Framework, serving as the spine of everything at Matriarc.
Matriarc is a senior-led brand advisory and full service marketing agency.
We’ve operated across every kind of environment: big institutions with complex stakeholder dynamics, scrappy projects that needed to move fast, and everything in between.
The REAL™ Framework
REAL™ is our signature framework. It’s how we move ideas from instinct to impact without flattening them along the way. And it’s the standard we hold ourselves to in every engagement, whether or not you ever see it by name.