The first time you see your site, you should want to meet yourself.

I’m a storyteller. I build brands for a living.

My flagship is Bella Principessa, an Italian Prosecco brand. I’ve spent years studying Italian aesthetics and the codes of luxury: why some things feel expensive before you’ve even touched them.

I design the products, the packaging and the campaigns, and I’ve worked on dozens of trademarks. So I see a brand from every angle.

Everyone has ideas. Very few people pull one out of thin air and breathe life into it: a name, a bottle, a label, something you can pick up, pour and hand to a friend. Call it alchemy.

Put one of those bottles in someone’s hand and I’m proud of it. The website was always where it fell short. I’d look at it and think, “It looks good.” I was never proud of it.

I am now.

Here’s why that took so long, and why it applies to you too.

In this note 8 parts

1. Sound familiar?
2. A thousand details
3. The words
4. Pictures
5. Why it matters
6. No expert needed
7. Where I come from
8. Get in touch

Sound familiar?

• You’ve said, “Ignore the website, we’re redoing it.”
• You send people your LinkedIn instead of your site.
• You paid for a theme, then paid again to fix it.
• You wrote your own About page at midnight.
• A competitor’s site made you wince, because it’s better.

Me too. Every one of them.

Death by a thousand details

Most websites start from a template: a theme off a marketplace, or a Squarespace or Wix layout.

I’ve bought themes for a few hundred pounds and spent thousands more trying to fix them. They never looked right, because they were designed for someone else.

The font is almost right. The spacing is a little off. The photos don’t match. The logo sits awkwardly. None of it matters on its own. Together, the site never looks as good as the business behind it.

The words matter as much as the look

Whoever builds your site can only work with what you give them: your copy, your bio, your description of what you do.

Most people aren’t writers, so it becomes a chatbot draft. It reads well once. Then you notice everyone else’s reads the same way. On LinkedIn it already feels like chatbots commenting on chatbots. People can tell, and they want real.

So we write it for you. You talk; we draw the story out of you, keep it short, and make you the hero of it.

Pictures do half the talking

A site is only as good as its pictures. For most people that means a few phone shots and an old headshot.

If yours aren’t there yet, we’ll make you images you can be proud of to launch with, then tell you exactly what to commission from a photographer, so the real shoot is quick and worth every penny.

Why it matters

The suit you wear to the meeting. The restaurant you book. The car you pull up in. People read all of it before you say a word.

Your website works the same way, except it’s doing the talking when you’re not in the room.

People judge a website’s look in about 50 milliseconds, and that snap judgement holds up after a longer look.¹ In a Stanford study, nearly half of people judged a site’s credibility partly on its design.²

Before a meeting, a hire or a first order, people look you up, usually on a phone. Even after they’ve met you, they look you up again. It’s the one part of a first impression you fully control.

You don’t need to be an expert

That’s the whole point. You bring four things:

• Your materials, however rough.
• What you want the site to achieve.
• What you like, and what you don’t.
• A site you love: “If mine looked half as good as that, I’d be happy.”

That’s our benchmark. Then we go past it.

If you can’t picture what happy looks like, nobody can deliver it. So show us. It’s the quickest way to work with us.

Where I come from

I’m an agent in visual persuasion.

I’m a Londoner. I started online, with an internet start-up in 1999, back when websites were built in Flash. That’s where I cut my teeth: branding, online marketing, the interface, and the servers underneath it.

Then print, on shoots that ran in Vogue, GQ and Elle.

The tools have changed every few years since. The skill hasn’t: say it as directly as possible, in words and in pictures. Put the two together and people stop.

I know how American brands sell, and I bring a European eye and an Italian brand’s sense of craft. Your site gets both.