Just like that, we’re another year older and another year wiser… Brilliant Agency is now in its ninth year!
A brilliant milestone for us.
Since our last birthday, we’ve had quite the year. From winning new clients to elevations in the team and delivering the most impactful work we’ve ever delivered, it’s been a big one.
So to celebrate the big number nine, we’re shouting about nine things we’re especially proud of from the last twelve months. As they say: ‘it’s our birthday and we’ll list our accomplishments if we want to!’
1. Not one, but two new Brilliant bakery brands!
It’s fair to say we were very keen to work on a brand that made baked goods let alone bread, cake, waffles and brioche. St Pierre Groupe, an international market leader in the bakery industry, wanted to up the comms for their two brands Baker Street and St Pierre. We pitched to inject new personality into their comms focusing on social media and offline activations. After a few months of rising to the Baker Street, challenge St. Pierre Groupe then approached us to work on their other brand St. Pierre makers of high-quality brioche and other European-inspired baked goods – what a win!
Working with the Baker Street and St. Pierre teams has been an absolute joy, we’re excited for all the campaigns and bread-based hilarity to come.
2. Innovative plant-milk brand? Yes, peas.
Leeds-based pea milk brand Mighty Pea was in the middle of a re-brand and on the cusp of launching a massive crowdfunding campaign but wanted their social media and marketing to be more impactful.
After taking them on as a client, we were able to see them through their crowdfunding success (which overfunded by £143,000) and launch a punchier look with messaging that had much more personality.
This is what Tom Watkins, Mighty Pea Co-founder said about our efforts:
“From day one Brilliant knew exactly what we were after and used their experience and expertise to help us re-launch Mighty Pea! Working with them is easy and they have become an essential part of the Mighty family.”
3. Taking on all of The English Provender Co’s brands
Having spent a year or so creating engaging content for Very Lazy and English Provender, The English Provender Company gave us the opportunity to take over the social media marketing for their two other brands.
These were Ravish, an extremely creative new relish brand aimed at millennials and Newman’s Own – the UK arm of Hollywood star Paul Newman’s brand he founded back in 1982.
Both of these have been hugely exciting brands to work on for completely different reasons. Already having a close relationship with the EPC team we were able to part of the early strategy and branding of Ravish and contribute to the creation of a super-exciting, forward-thinking brand and product.
Newman’s Own was the polar opposite. It had an incredibly rich and colourful brand story that started with a world-famous, philanthropic and eccentric actor, some great stockists and products but not quite the awareness it deserved. Extra motivation for Newman’s came from the fact that all profits from the products go to a number of incredible charities – another super exciting brand to work on for the team!
4. Seeing the Brilliant team grow and develop
One thing about the Brilliant team is they’ll consistently go above and beyond. It’s what makes us Brilliant. We’ve been very excited to have seen a number of the team progress and be elevated over this past year through showing initiative time and time again and delivering so much for our clients.
Lynne, our Studio Manager, moved up to Head of Client Services, Jonathan, our Senior Designer, became our Head of Design and Copywriter & Community Manager, Joe, became Brilliant’s Lead Copywriter & Community Manager. Go team!
We’ve also welcomed a new member to our team this March too! We’re very excited that Hayley Brent became the newest member of Brilliant as our Senior Account Manager. Hayley joined just as the lockdown was put in place so her introduction to the team was not without certain challenges. She has, however, integrated into the team unbelievably well and we’re extremely excited to have her on board. Who needs to meet in person for a new job, anyway?
5. A Brilliant baby!
On the subject of welcoming new team members… we welcomed baby Hal to the Brilliant team! Our Brilliant directors Laurra and Mike had their second child, Hal last August and we had him helping out in the office immediately.
Incidentally, little Hal is 9 months old as we turn nine years old. Coincidence?
…Yes. But a fun one nonetheless!
6. Good health is good business -wellbeing at work
Wellbeing has always been a big part of the Brilliant ethos but over the past twelve months, we’ve made it a central focus for cultivating the best work culture we can. Other than offering gym membership to all staff, we started a monthly movement session at Sudden Movements gym in Armley. Here, as well as rolling around on the floor and crawling like various animals, we’ve learned how movement can improve our physical and mental wellbeing (as well as quaffed coffee and necked nice cakes – cheers Colin!).
We also had quarterly talks from fitness and wellbeing guru, Joel who talked to us about the importance of sleep, nutrition and movement. We also introduced staggered working times for our team to best accommodate sleep patterns and lifestyle to aid this too.
We’re certain all of these things have aided our team to be even more efficient and creative in their work and, hopefully, much of what we have collectively learned has come in especially useful over the past few months too.
7. From Paris with Brioche
After winning the work for St. Pierre, some of our team were invited to Paris for a week to soak up the Parisian lifestyle as well as integrate with the St. Pierre team and agency partners from the US. Here they had a long list of inspiring, thought-provoking and productive activities including workshops, a tour of Paris, three-course meals (lunch and dinner) and of course an evening riverboat tour.
Our lucky Brilliant members were able to fully immerse themselves in the art, food and culture of the Parisian lifestyle to better understand the brand and the rich story behind St. Pierre that is so tied up with the city.
With brioche to die for, a great team to collaborate with and potential trips to Paris… suffice to say, everyone wants to be on the team that works with St. Pierre! Read more on the trip here.
8. Brewing up a sales storm for Beanies Flavour Coffee
Beanies Flavour Coffee has been a client we’ve worked with for many years and we’ve created an incredibly large and fanatic customer base. As we entered the start of the pandemic in March, we were able to strategise ways to use our knowledge of the customers, new information on shopper behaviour and less competitive advertising to phenomenal success.
Knowing that customers were missing their barista-brewed favourites and our Beanies fans adoration for new products, Beanies released a new range of Barista Beanies Coffee flavours and we went to work on new photography, eye-catching graphics, engaging copy and a head-turning strapline.
The result of this product launch with our ad-strategy and the help of a new Facebook group, the Beanies Cafe (which acted as a virtual cafe for the fans to meet at), we managed to return incredible sales and social media statistics for our client. Including:
- Increased brand awareness with 8.5k new social media followers in April
- Had their best ever day of sales and month of sales
- Increase in revenue by 183%
- Increased ROAS by 54%
- Increased conversions through New Product Launches and Online Multi-Buy Offers
- Achieved above industry average open rate for email campaigns (26.8%, industry average is 21.33%)
An incredible set of results that once again highlights our team’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances and come up with creative and effective solutions for our clients. Unbelievably good work team!
9. An epic team response during a global pandemic.
The success of the Beanies work illustrates perfectly what the ninth item on our list is. It is the ability, resourcefulness and attitude of our team and how they’ve shown they have the grit, resilience, teamwork and creativity to pull together to deliver Brilliant work no matter the situation. Seeing the team adapt to working from home, support each other and battling to do right by our clients at all times has been something we’ve been incredibly proud of.
With that in mind, we have a huge cause for celebration of our ninth birthday and though we can’t get all our team together at Brilliant HQ and have a right banger of a b-day party, rest assured we’ll be planning it in as soon as we safely can!