WORDS THAT DID THEIR BRAND JUSTICE
BEACHBUM
- VERBAL IDENTITY
- VOICE OF CUSTOMER
- RESEARCH
- MESSAGING STRATEGY
- COPYWRITING COPYBOT
Beachbum wanted to stand out in a category where everyone sounds the same and speak to an audience that included everyone from cliff divers to dog walkers, all without losing the brand they'd spent years building. Instead of taking the easy route ("Whether you're walking the dog or chasing an adrenalin-filled weekend…"), we looked for what connected them all and found it wasn't what people did outdoors, it was how being outdoors made them feel. That aha! moment became the core of the new Beachbum identity, voice and messaging.
NURSEM
Nursem were a few years post-Den (offers from all five dragons) and felt their early-stage messaging no longer matched where the brand was going. We rebuilt their hero messaging around being nurse-founded, award-winning, having 1M+ happy customers and giving back so it did the brand they'd become justice and sat with their premium pricing.
WORLD MOBILE
World Mobile had a complex challenge to solve. How should a mission-driven telco brand with a unique community-led profit share model and complex technology (internet powered by blimps and the blockchain) sound? Across two sessions with their founders, marketing team and C-suite, we got everyone aligned on a single voice, then built the identity and messaging system that kept it consistent wherever it showed up, from billboards to websites to around Premier League games. (Jack was very happy when his copy could be seen during a Spurs game.)
TREECARD
Treecard launched as a wooden bank card that planted trees with strong early traction, but it was blending in among other green fintech. Before the launch of their v.2 app, we took their copy and voice and dialled it up, making it stickier, more tangible and more compelling to their target audience.
DISCORD
Discord needed a hand adapting their voice for their moderator audience that was half Discord user, half Discord insider. That meant taking their playful voice that's full of in-jokes and adapting it to be slightly more serious, without it feeling any less Discord-y.
PLANTABLES
Plantables came to us with a new plant brand and a mission: to launch a brand that made growing plants fun and nothing like the seed catalogue tone reserved for retired gardeners. From that, we built the whole voice from scratch: playful, warm, and a little bit silly so every interaction with the brand felt fun. Then we wrote the guidelines to keep it consistent, so the voice worked on a seed box, in an infographic, or anywhere else the brand turned up.
TOAST BREWING
When lockdown left Toast's team stretched thin, they needed help making sure everyone could write in their voice when it was all hands to the pump. They already had the belief (“If you want to change the world, you have to throw a better party than those destroying it”) but no voice to go with it. So we built them one and distilled it into a single page their whole team could pick up and run with, no matter how chaotic things got.
SPOT
Spot is a virtual-workspace platform built by the founders of Outreach.io, used by teams at Apple, Google and Amazon. We built their verbal identity from the ground up based on evolving their core proposition and digging into competitor research, and customer insights before turning that into a full voice system so every department could write like Spot. Then we put it to work across their new website.
ANIMAL
In the late 2010s, the Animal team noticed that years of safe, category-standard language had smoothed away some of their voice’s authentic surf creds. So we went back through the archive and spoke to the pros and early insiders who knew the real Animal and rebuilt the voice from what we found so it felt like Animal again. Then we trained the team on how to use it and stayed on as fractional support for the next few years.
MERCK
Merck were launching a chronic cough app that helped patients track their coughing using early AI. The catch: it only worked if people were willing to leave their phone listening to them all day. Our job was to find language that made something that could have felt quite intrusive feel safe and empowering. Stack compliance on top of that and it was a really knotty messaging challenge that resulted in an app that patients reported “absolutely loving” with very few concerns about privacy. Result.
DRINKWELL & TRACES WINE
Low-cal and low-alc drinks have a branding problem: they almost always reads as a compromise. They’re the thing you drink when you're being good. Drinkwell wanted to be the opposite. So we wrote copy that positioned Traces as a lifestyle, not a diet: it’s a wine for Sunday roasts and good company. You can drink it any time. It’s a proper wine, not a guilt-free wine. The low-cal angle became a reason to enjoy it more, not a way to consume less calories. (Which helped us to write around the heavy restrictions without the copy becoming lawyer language soup.)
WHISKY FOUNDATION
Whisky branding is written almost entirely for male drinkers, swapping between tweedy and macho, but always unmistakably male. Whisky Foundation wanted to speak to everyone who loves whisky, women very much included, without the patronising assumptions of gender or the trappings of talking about notes in a slightly snobby tone. So we built them a full voice: one that took whisky seriously without taking itself seriously, and welcomed people in instead of gatekeeping them out. That meant VOC, competitor research, and guidelines the whole team could write from.
RNLI
The RNLI runs like an emergency service — with crews launching into the worst of the sea, any hour, any weather — but it's funded almost entirely by donations. Every Christmas, the appeal has to make people feel that, and give. We contributed the emails, brochure, and social copy for the national campaign that raised £16.4M, plus journalistic-style storytelling and content and messaging for some of their biggest brand-partnership campaigns with gaming giants and a certain mouse-themed movie studio. (Walking that NDA tightrope.)