Maybe it’s just us, but talking about the work we do isn’t easy. It should be the simplest thing in the world: You help a client, see them grow, tell the world and get even more work. But for some reason, we always stumble at the last hurdle (which is an improvement from school, where we stumbled over every hurdle – hurdles being of course, inherently evil).
So, with a new year upon us, we’ll try to do a bit better and communicate our successes. And what better client to start with than famed Italian bicycle frame builder, Dario Pegoretti.
We’ve been working with the team at Pegoretti since the brand’s namesake and founder, Dario Pegoretti passed away in August 2018. At the time, the world quite naturally assumed that, given Dario’s legendary skill and outsize personality, the brand would struggle to continue. What few realised was that over the years, Dario had built an incredibly talented team that had all but replaced his day-to-day input.
A Storytelling Strategy
Pegoretti is a perfect example of how smaller brands require a suite of services, rather than one highly specialised skill.
Our first task was to create a strategy that would sensitively tell the story of the brand, easing the focus away from Dario to imbue other members of the team with a little bit of the same magic, and introduce the idea of an artisanal ‘Bottega’ in the Italian tradition. The longterm play, of course, was to loosen the connection to any one person and to elevate the breadth of talent behind the frames.
With the strategy established, it simply became a case of executing the plan: through video (beautifully shot by Shelbourne Films), copy, email marketing, a site redesign, press releases and bicycle industry shows.
”Pegoretti is a perfect example of how smaller brands require a suite of services, rather than one highly specialised skill.
On paper, it all seems very straightforward, but the reality was quite different. When we talk about ‘brand’, we’re talking about deep feelings – in the case of Pegoretti, a palpable sense of care, of pride, community and ownership. Love, if you will. We couldn’t just transfer that emotional investment like so many files on a computer.
What the strategy required was the customer’s belief that the story was true. That it is true, is why the team at Pegoretti have successfully come to the end of their first year of business with a full order book, new products in the works and exciting collaborations on the horizon.
