Small shops, big launches

Most of our clients have a marketing team, a launch budget and someone whose job is the website. A few times a year we work with a business that has none of those: a maker, usually two people, sometimes one, with a good product and a spreadsheet of orders. We take these projects on deliberately. They are small, they move quickly and they teach us things the larger ones cannot.

Hollin was one of them. Esme Garside and Dan Whitworth pour candles by hand in a two-room unit in an old cotton mill in the Calder Valley. When they came to us in the spring of 2020 they sold at three markets, all of which had just closed, and through one marketplace. Their own shop opened that November and sold its first run of 1,200 candles in six days. A year later they had 46 stockists. This is what we took from it.

Design for the packing table

For a business of two, every decision about packaging is also a decision about their evenings. Esme timed the old packing routine for us: eleven minutes an order, most of it spent measuring boxes and cutting tissue. So the first drawing we made was not a label but a plan of the table. We kept a stock jar, which was good and affordable, and changed what goes around it. A paper band in two inks holds the scent card, so nothing is glued to the glass. One size of box takes every candle. A single rubber stamp marks the box, so there are no printed shippers to run out of. Packing an order now takes four minutes.

For a business of two, the packing table is the brand.

Spend where the customer looks

With a small budget the temptation is to spread it evenly. We spend it on the two or three things a customer actually holds or sees. For Hollin that was the band, the first photograph on the shop and the stockist pack, a printed folder that did most of the selling to independent shops. The box, the tissue and the website footer got almost nothing, and nobody has noticed.

• Put most of the print budget into one object, and print it well.
• Photograph the product where it is made. Hollin’s shop pictures were taken on the mill windowsills where the candles cure.
• Build the shop on a standard platform the client can run alone, with room for twelve products rather than two hundred.
• Write the stockist pack before the website. Shop owners read it more carefully than customers read anything.

Launch smaller than you think

Our instinct on bigger projects is to launch everything at once. With makers we do the opposite. Hollin opened with six scents in one size, a mailing list of about 900 people from the markets and no paid advertising. A first run that sells out is worth more to a small business than a large one that sits in boxes, because it brings people back for the second. We learned something similar a year earlier with Torno, a furniture workshop in Lisbon: a short first collection, photographed properly, does more than a long one photographed in a hurry.

Hand it over properly

A small business cannot call us every time it needs a new product page. So the last two weeks of a maker project are about handover: templates for new scents, a short guide to the photography and a list of the decisions they should not change without thinking twice. Esme added three winter scents on her own the following year, and they look as though we made them. These projects are not where the studio makes its money, and we will never do many of them at once. But they keep us honest about cost, about time and about what a brand is actually for.