Every question, every answer — unedited from here on out.
What's the itch you can't stop scratching in this industry?
Cheyenne: This industry makes itself so inaccessible that we lose the best new ideas, the people, brands and products right on the edge of something great, because we've decided their work isn't “worth it” yet. We're a business, sure, but seeing potential before it's proven is what's missing. That's what I want Mudcloth known for.
Darrell: Impact, always. I've been drawn to mission-driven work since I got into this industry — public health campaigns, community engagement, transportation access. Even after working bigger consumer accounts, this is the area I keep coming back to.
What's your background, and what did it teach you?
Cheyenne: Bouncing between social strategy, influencer marketing, inclusion, and experiential event production taught me you don't have to pick one lane; you just have to be willing to admit what you don't know and do the work to learn it.
Darrell: People make most of their important decisions based on value and values.
What's specifically yours in this partnership — the muscle your co-founder doesn't have?
Cheyenne: My thing is finding the story within the story. I'm chasing the version that goes beyond the “key messages,” and that builds the relationship.
Darrell: My thing is media strategy: how a brand shows up, how the introduction happens. I take the story Cheyenne creates and figure out how to turn it into real results, without losing what makes that story and its audience unique.
What's a belief that might ruffle some feathers?
Cheyenne: Big agency, as we know it, is over, and I say that as someone who came up inside one. Once the bottom line becomes more important than the people, there's a problem.
Darrell: This industry doesn't have enough diverse opinions and backgrounds in the rooms where decisions get made or ideas get heard.
What do you nerd out about outside of work?
Cheyenne: Beyoncé. Anybody who knows me knows I'm big Beyhive — but it's not just the music. It's the artistry, the detail, the storytelling she's built over decades, and how all of it connects. It's made me think about our work the same way: not just as a campaign, but as how it weaves into a brand's story five or ten years out.
Darrell: How much time do you have? The Seahawks, the Kings, Sac Republic, politics, urban planning, public transit, climate science, picking the perfect watermelon — and music, obviously. All of it makes me curious about how different people experience the same thing, which is exactly what shows up in my audience research.
Describe your working style as one weird, real image.
Cheyenne: Old-school one-man band — the guy with like twenty instruments strapped to his body, marching down the street playing all of them at once. That's genuinely how my brain works. I like being in everything, all at the same time.
Darrell: A line cook's station — but like, after service has been going for a while.
Name a project that made you think “that's the kind of work I want to be known for.”
Cheyenne: Spotify Wrapped. It came from an intern's idea, and she solved the actual hard problem: how do you turn raw data into a story people want to engage with. I want Mudcloth to create more spaces for those kinds of ideas.
Darrell: The old iPod commercials were incredible. I loved that whole era of advertising.
“People underestimate me because ___, but actually ___.”
Cheyenne: People underestimate me because I come across silly and unserious, but actually, I'm clocking everything and quietly a beast at this work.
Darrell: People underestimate me because I'm quiet, but actually I'm observant — like Burr.
What's your first memory of the two of you together?
Cheyenne: Seeing The Little Mermaid on base, and me throwing up and probably crying. I was really on his nerves all the time.
Darrell: I don't actually know how long. But I remember being at my house, mixing cleaning supplies in a bucket, calling it soup.
What's the real story behind how your friendship actually started?
Cheyenne: I always joke that Darrell was my bully, but we were more like siblings or cousins who got on each other's nerves, and I always knew he'd show up for me. I really was that sensitive, only-child crybaby, so my buttons were easy to push. What I actually love about our backstory: we weren't forced together as kids, we chose to become best friends later, and that's exactly what makes it stronger.
Darrell: I was a little bit of a bully. It was never because I didn't like her — Cheyenne was just soft, honestly, and if she'd been a boy it probably wouldn't have been an issue. I thought she was a crybaby, which made me want to push her more, like she needed to toughen up. Looking back, I should've been a better friend. I was young and wild. We move.
Remember that class in college where you were both building apps? What do you remember building, and what was working together like even then?
Cheyenne: My app was a makeup app (which I was obsessed with in college), and he kept pushing me further on it. That's the shape of our whole dynamic: I bring the idea, and Darrell goes “okay, let's build the actual infrastructure for that.” College is really when we locked in as brainstorming partners — he's still my favorite person to build with.
Darrell: I made this wonky golf app — basically 18 Birdies before it existed. It was fun. I loved how Cheyenne was always the one going, “ooh, what if you did this?”
You tried building something together before this. What happened, and what did you learn that's showing up in Mudcloth now?
Cheyenne: We didn't know yet what we wanted to do in this industry, or what was even possible beyond what we'd seen. After a lot of trial and error, we know now: we're chasing work that can genuinely change something for someone — even something as specific as a Black-owned soda brand mattering to somebody's life. That's exactly what's showing up in how we built Mudcloth.
Darrell: Honestly, I don't think we were ever meant to do traditional PR — though there are pieces of it I genuinely enjoy now. The podcast was dope, I just don't think we were passionate enough about the format itself. If we brought it back focused on culture — how this industry shapes it, the people and brands actually doing that, mission-driven work — that'd be worth doing. The real lesson: you need genuine passion for anything that takes this much effort.
What's it actually like working with your co-founder day to day? Where do you clash, where do you land on the same page instantly, and why does that combination work?
Cheyenne: A genuine right-brain/left-brain match, and he keeps me from turning into that one-man band, doing everything at once. On “subdued,” though — I don't know if that's the word. Darrell's taste is incredible, just different: mine's maximalist, big, bright; his is more restrained. I wouldn't even call it a clash — more like “I prefer this, you prefer that,” and we always land on a compromise.
Darrell: We iterate well, and mesh creatively and strategically in a lot of ways. Cheyenne's far more creative than I am — my mind goes straight to structure and process, so her creative side balances that out. It's also exactly where we clash sometimes: on the actual look of things. Our taste is similar, mine's just a bit more subdued.
Your metaphor for the two of you?
Cheyenne: Beyoncé and Kelly, Gina and Pam, Raven and Chelsea, Cher and Dionne, Timon and Pumbaa, Arthur and Buster. But if I had to pick just one: Troy and Abed. That's really us.
Darrell: Tom and Jerry. Shaq and Kobe. Kim and Ron. Malcolm and Martin. Just dynamic duos.
What do you think Mudcloth is because it’s specifically the two of you, and not some other pair of strategists?
Cheyenne: However we got here, we both bring everything we have — one hundred percent each, every time, so clients really are getting two hundred. That might sound cheesy, but it's real. And it's not new: people have said this about us since college, since the podcast, way before Mudcloth existed. We just work well together, and it's exciting to finally get to bring that to clients.
Darrell: Because it's us, Mudcloth feels like the generation we come from — we remember the world before the internet, before cell phones, before streaming. Where we grew up, and who we grew up around, gave us this specific eye for culture and how to talk to completely different audiences. Between the two of us, we've genuinely experienced almost every angle of culture — Beale Street, church, Yuba City, being Black, born right between two eras. And we're still learning.
