Ashley named the company. She also designed every property's identity, every photo set, every line of copy on the website — including the one on the home page that says same hands, different light. Before Refract she ran a small design studio in Bentonville, working with the kind of regional brands that built Northwest Arkansas before anyone outside it knew the name.
She handles the front-of-house: the listing photos, the welcome notes, the way each property looks when it shows up in your phone. She has opinions about typefaces. She has opinions about door hardware. She has very strong opinions about which Onyx Coffee location is the best on a Sunday. She's also a co-founder of aura.refract, where she owns the lens, the brand, and the creative direction — Kim Brannon runs the business side.
She's CEO of Refract Ventures — the operating company beneath the family enterprise. She doesn't run any single business day-to-day; each one has its own operator. Instead she takes a light operating role inside every part of the portfolio: mentoring the people who run each company, doing the technical work of keeping the platforms the whole enterprise runs on working, and owning the financial and legal oversight that holds it all together. She's been the steady hand since the first parcel, even as the kids have taken over their own domains.
Married Cody in 2008. Mom to Jordan, Jacey, and Cash. Believes the difference between a property and a brand is whether anyone can tell you wrote it.