Heather Smith

Heather Smith grew up in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia — the child of an American family living and working within the world of Aramco, where her earliest years were shaped by the particular texture of expat life in the Middle East. She grew up a Third Culture Kid, forming her understanding of the world across cultural contexts that were each genuinely distinct — American by passport, global by experience, and at home in the space between.

What that upbringing produces, over time, is a kind of perceptiveness that most people develop only through years of deliberate study. Heather learned early to pay attention to what a culture signals: the unwritten social codes, the register shifts, the moments when communication is technically happening but meaning is not travelling. Her background in Cultural Anthropology and Global Studies brought academic rigour to instincts she had been sharpening since childhood — a human-first lens on why people communicate the way they do, what governs the way they listen, and where the distance between intent and reception quietly accumulates.

Professionally, Heather has built her career at the intersection of brand architecture, marketing strategy, and cultural intelligence — fields that, in her hands, are not separate disciplines but a single practice. She has worked extensively in private aviation and luxury travel, industries where the quality of communication is the product — where being seen, understood, and well-received is not a courtesy but the entire point. As Strategic Marketing Lead at XPJ Aviation, she built the brand architecture, voice, communications infrastructure, and client experience systems of a private aviation startup from the ground up. Before that, her work in luxury brand development sharpened a discipline she had been practicing since childhood: reading what a brand is actually communicating, and ensuring that matches what it intends. Her work at Bruyère Boutique, a curated sustainable resale practice, reflects the same conviction — that curation itself is a form of cultural intelligence, and that what we choose to offer communicates something essential about who we are.

She continues to travel extensively approaching each place as a student of its culture, its people, and its particular way of orienting the world. At Interstice, she brings all of it to bear: the early life, the academic grounding, a professional career built on making communication land, and a way of paying attention that has been her practice since long before it became her work.