I saw this and thought of you

A friend of mine has this wonderful image in a frame at the top of her stairs.

It’s by artist Corrina Rothwell, who I’ve never met but has a range of cards for sale here.

Boringly brilliant

Again, this is from my pre-ethical-only days, but I include it here because I think the idea (not mine) is genius.

From memory, the mailing was to prevent the haemorrhaging of customers in a newly deregulated marketplace. The pack itself is very dull, but I always had this in my portfolio because the offer was so clever. It was this: Get discounts from other people!

Essentially, it’s a “loyalty programme” that costs almost nothing. (It even had to be in two colours to save on cost.) We sent out a blank envelope:

Inside was a letter with a laminated card glued on:

And on the back of the card, a bunch of offers:

There are so many ways to apply this idea, I almost wouldn’t know where to start.

The invisible portfolio

One of the problems with writing websites is that they tend to disappear.

I’d love to show you the work I did for ercol, for example. But it’s changed so much that only a few sentence fragments remain.

When I was employed at Publicis-Dialog during the noughties, I did an even bigger job for a housebuilder called Wilcon Homes. Their existing site wasn’t very user friendly, so we started again and created an enormous site with tons of information on every part of the housebuying process. One of the big changes was in the search engine – I thought it made more sense to look for a new home by location or price, instead of the name of the development. It’s pretty obvious (and I think the same about travel agents), but apparently it was revolutionary. A few years later I met someone who told me it became the industry leading website. I tried to find it this week, but after we re-branded Wilcon Homes to Wilson Connolly, it was bought by another housebuilder, who has since been bought by yet another.

Happily, I found the current owners of the website here. They are still using the same search engine and much of the information I originally wrote. There’s even some of my wording on the homepage. It’s not all mine, though – I would never start a paragraph with the word “We”.