Charles & Ivy is an online retailer selling high-quality, contemporary fencing, screens and decorative panels.
The challenge
When repeated pandemic lockdowns sparked a wave of interest in home and garden improvement, Charles & Ivy’s founders identified an opportunity to bring to market an innovative product range that aligned with the trend.
Charles & Ivy was confident it had the financial, manufacturing and logistical expertise necessary to launch. However, it knew it needed director-level marketing input too. Charles & Ivy engaged LOCK to ensure it had a brand that would communicate its unique proposition, gain customer trust, generate sales and encourage loyalty.
Our solution
Following in-depth research into Charles & Ivy’s business, customers and competitors, we worked closely with the founders to develop Charles & Ivy’s brand strategy.
First, we helped them articulate the business’ unique brand platform (its purpose, vision, mission, values and personality) and its key messages.
We then developed the brand’s visual and verbal identity. The Charles & Ivy team had done some initial logo development, so we engaged the talented team at rbl to amplify this into a fully-formed visual identity that projects the business’ stylish, sophisticated brand. We then created Charles & Ivy’s verbal identity to support its employees to write on-brand copy for the business.
Moving on to the implementation stage of the project, we began with Charles & Ivy’s prime retail location: its ecommerce website. Collaborating with the business’ web developers, we directed the user experience and visual identity application, and also wrote all website copy, including detailed product descriptions for the entire Charles & Ivy range and all automatic customer emails.
Finally, we provided training for Charles & Ivy’s employees to support them to project the business’ brand accurately, and ensured the brand identity was consistently applied to physical business assets including product packaging, uniforms and vehicle livery.
The result
“We really enjoyed working with LOCK. They quickly understood our vision for a premium, quality brand for our business and delivered exactly what we wanted. They were also clearly passionate about our business and cared about our success, which made it a pleasure to work with them.
After they developed our brand they had a great understanding of our products and our customer base, which meant we were able to go back to them for advice, direction and creative input on a whole host of other marketing and business areas. They were really adaptable and flexible, and accommodated our needs as our project evolved, including delivering brand training for all our new employees which they pitched at just the right level. In short, I wish I’d had the opportunity to work with LOCK years ago, and would recommend them to any business who thinks they could be doing their marketing better.”