Liezl Croft is an utterly lovely wedding and family portrait photographer. A force of South African fabulousness, creative, warm, friendly and with an eye for fun she asked us to create a brand refresh and blogsite that would reflect where her business is today as well as (of course) attracting and retaining lots of new clients.

And whilst we’ve been working with her on her printed literature now for several years, I was delighted when she asked us to give her blog a brandover. Having set up her business less than two years ago, Liezl had previously created her websites herself and felt that her business was at a level where she was ready to step things up a gear.

As well as being a cracking lifestyle photographer, Liezl is also very crafty and I think you’ll see that come through in the look and feel of the site.

We’ve worked on creating direct mail for Liezl in the past (which we won a design award last year for) but this project gave us the chance to really flex our creative muscles! We designed to create Liezl a WordPress based blogsite – a website and blog rolled into one which would give her the chance to showcase her photography without being too onerous to manage.

We put together a colour palette that created an aspirational feel, whilst plenty of texture and elements like the bunting creates a sensory quality and follows on from the work we did previously on the mailers. We all love the icons that Chloe created for each category, and the beautiful pattern that sets off the blog. I’d always known that Liezl’s work was beautiful, but what I hadn’t appreciated was the enormous difference the right surroundings make to her images.

If you take a look at the difference between the old blog and the new, I think you’ll agree they’re night and day apart.

Liezl’s old blog

I don’t want to embarrass anyone by going into this too heavily, let’s just say that the design of the blog had a long way to catch up with the quality of Liezl’s work…

And the new blogsite

Liezl has been so much fun to work with on this project and we wish her lots of luck with the new site and branding. It’s too early to measure the financial success of the blog – it’s been live for less than a month, but visits have doubled and the feedback to Liezl’s Facebook and Twitter page was overwhelming! Do hope on over and take a look (and do leave her a comment too, it’s so lovely to receive feedback when you’re writing your heart out and you know how lonely it can be when you’re first blogging)… You’ll find Liezl’s website and blog at www.liezlcroft.com

With less than two weeks to go until the launch of the fabulous online Branding Masterclass the team in the studio are working incredibly hard dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on the brand identity and blogsite. You can see the brand elements below.

You’re going to see a bit of a nip tuck to the Flourish brand identity over the next couple of months as we prepare for a very exciting extension and refocus on our own brand. I’ll be sharing more about the story behind that soon, but in the meantime, this gives you a flavour for where we’re headed. The Branding Masterclass needs to reflect and work with our brand, but it’s also a brand in it’s own right, with it’s own attributes and characteristics, so we needed to keep it all similar but not the same.

The colour palette focuses on creativity, communication, logic and clarity. The graph paper gives a nod to work (yes, it will be a lot of fun, but I will be working them hard too!) and the icons give direction around the site.

The class will be held online via a password protected blogsite, so we needed to create a clean and easy to navigate design that  inspired the participants to focus, reflect and take action. Here are a couple of screengrabs:

The login page

We wanted to keep this simple – it’s about getting people to do what you want – login or register for details of the next class. For the people that aren’t registered, obviously this is all they’ll see…

And the class pages themselves

I was in two minds about whether to show you this, but it just looks so beautiful that I couldn’t resist! I am desperate to overhaul the Full Bloom blog design now (yes, I know again but there is so much I’d like to change…). There are still a couple of changes to make but what I hope you can see is how light, airy and neat everything feels. The perfect setting to the inspirational and powerful nature of the content

Registration for the masterclass will close at midnight on Sunday 5th February so if you’d like to get involved, then don’t forget to book – go on, do it now, while you remember… Full details on the website.

Shameless plug alert! We have some wonderful business owners signed up to join me on 6th Feb for the Branding Masterclass but as the Early Bird Offer ends on Sunday I thought I’d give you a quick reminder of the reasons you need to book your place if you haven’t already:

1. Staying ahead of the game. You can never, ever say that your brand is “done”: markets move on, competitors spring up out of nowhere, your skills grow and develop and customer needs change. You need to be able to respond to that quickly and I’ll show you how in Week One.
2. Developing your brand identity to keep it fresh and inspiring. Whether you have a lovely logo and website or not, you’ll gain oodles of value from our forays into colour psychology and the mood board session in Week Two.
3. To ensure you get maximum bang out of this year’s marketing buck. This year is going to be tough, no doubt about it, but that doesn’t mean you need to slink back into the undergrowth and wait until it all passes. Get yourself out there and take advantage of the fact your competitors are shrinking away! We’ll create a powerful marketing plan in Week Three.
4. Because I’ll help you blow your clients away with every communication. We’ll map out your customer journey from the first enquiry to the last invoice and make sure you create a wow at every stage. You’ll love it!
5. Ratcheting up the effectiveness of your website. Because unless you have created your website in the last six months and you know there is nothing you can do to improve it you’ll get loads of value out of the website planning/ overhaul sessions in Week Four.
6. Reconnecting with your business and inspiring you to really get out there and make the most of this year. So it’s going to be tough? Well then let’s get focused and get ready to flourish! We’ll give you a number of exercises over the course of the four weeks to help reignite your passion for your business (even if you don’t think it’s waned), re inspire you and build your confidence.
7. It will help your business thrive this year. Not just grow, not just get your name out there. But really thrive. I’ll help you identify how to attract more of the profitable clients, communicate with flair and passion and inspire people to want to work with you.

A masterclass to inspire, motivate and reconnect you with your business

It’s an online class that starts on 6th Feb and runs for a month. You can pace yourself, so whatever your responsibilities, and where ever you live in the world, it can fit around you. All you need to do is commit to a couple of hours a week where you really focus on your business brand.I promise that it’ll be creative, inspirational and informative, and it will make a big difference to your brand (whether you have a lovely logo and website or not).

• Clarity and purpose around your brand strategy, niche, profitable clients and brand messaging
• A mood board to help you visualise and communicate how you’d like your brand to look and feel
• A marketing plan that helps you own and defend your niche and attract and retain the right sorts of clients
• A communication plan for your clients journey from enquiry to invoice that wows and inspires them
• A plan for a truly powerful website that attracts, engages and wins you business

In addition I’ll be sharing lots of inspirational case studies, behind the scenes insights from the design team at Flourish and plenty of useful tips, tools and techniques you can start using in your business immediately to make 2012 your best year yet.Here are some of the nice things people have said about previous workshops:

“It was very helpful to take time out and refocus on marketing priorities and how to be more consistent with the marketing messages I put out. Lots of clear, practical ideas – thanks!”

Anne Williams, Worklife Balance Solutions

“Thank you so much for a very inspirational and practical workshop. I feel much more confident about promoting my business now.”
Sue Goodson, Floreal Therapies

Investment for the whole four weeks is just £165+VAT when you book your place before 23rd January and this includes all the course notes, follow up support, bags of expert info, a 20 minute one to one with me and a £75 Flourish gift voucher.So why not start your year as you mean to go on – with purpose and inspiration, and join me for a fun, creative and purposeful Branding Masterclass. Book your place today and prepare to take your brand up a gear!

And I do understand that thinking, but it doesn’t make good business sense. Why? Because that same slow decline into Christmas is often mirrored on the other side, and it’s often February before life lets you start planning ahead. As you know, we’re working hard to dangle some carrots to get you thinking about your websites and logos this side of Christmas (and whilst we will be dangling some carrots in January, our biggest carrots will go to the lovely people who have already started thinking ahead!) and so I thought that we might celebrate some of those Forward Thinkers on the blog.

Introducing… Griffin Glasshouses

Linda Lane is Managing Director of Griffin Glasshouses and one of our first Forward Thinkers. Linda is planning ahead for a busy Spring season and has asked us to create a new website. We spent a couple of hours mapping out the website with Linda and her team – planning the customer journey, understanding how we could make the most of Griffin’s sales funnel and understanding how the site should be structured.

For the last couple of weeks Linda has been able to focus on her day job whilst we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes: developing concepts. creating wireframes and this week, creating a knockout design that I hope knocks the socks off the current design.

The Current Website

Naturally there’ll need to be a little input (when Linda and her team are ready) to review the designs and feed back to us with any changes, but the idea is that the whole process is as efficient as possible to enable the Griffin Glasshouse team to focus on what they do best while we do what we do best.

And with a small sprinkle of Flourish magic dust

This is a bit of a work in progress, but you get the idea…

The next step is to create the look and feel for the rest of the pages once we know that these initial concepts are headed in the right direction. I’m really looking forward to seeing the impact the new design, navigation and structure have on the Griffin Glasshouse enquiry levels, and most importantly, their sales. Watch this space…

These posts are a bit like busses aren’t they? You wait for one In The Studio This Week and then two come along at once!

Harriet Tipping is a very lovely nutritional therapist who has just about to launch her business, Nutribeing. She already had a logo but no brand identity to speak of, so we really had a very free rein (within the confines of the brief of course!).

The brief for this blog design was to create something that felt fresh, uplifting and healthy. I think it’s a great example of a very clean and professional Spring design. You can just feel the energy bursting out of that green can’t you? And yet the purple keeps it restrained and the attention to detail in the layout and typography keeps the whole feel professional and smart.

I really can’t wait to get this live for Harriet as I know it’ll be a great platform for her to start to launch her business. Keep your eyes peeled too because over the next week or so we’ll be sharing the new website design for Nutribeing with you too…

It seems like forever since I’ve shared a snapshot of some of our work from the studio doesn’t it? We’ve been incredibly busy over the last month or so working on some really exciting projects and I’m delighted to share a couple of them with you this week. First up… A stunning website design for Sport Surface Solutions.

We love to do things that shake things up a bit, get people to sit up and take notice of a company, and as ever, prove that design for small businesses can be just as well thought out, just as aspirational as design for the big boys. Chloe has really enjoyed the challenge of working on a very masculine, Winter design and I think she’s pulled it off with bells on.

Sport Surface Solutions do exactly what the name suggests. They install and maintain sports surfaces and are clearly doing the right thing getting their marketing literature in order right now in time for Olympic hysteria in the summer!

Chloe has developed a new logo design and brand identity as well as website design which ties the whole look together. Those of you that follow our passion for colour psychology will notice the Winter traits: strong colours, strong alignment and structure, premium feel and impactful images. There is no messing about here: this is a website design for a company that means business.

The designs are currently in the process of being finalised before we move on to the build (hence the positional rather than final images) but I will share the build with you once it’s complete… I hope you like

Yesterday saw the first of our Focus and Flourish workshops that I’m running with the fabulous Elizabeth Cairns. And whilst I’m still slightly shattered from such an action packed day, we had such amazing feedback and I saw such leaps forward in each guest that I just had to share some of the highlights of the day with you.

The whole premise of the day was to get people to create a vision and marketing plan for their business that was authentically tied in with their personal values. And I know. Yada yada yada whatever, too socks and sandals… Well actually I think it’s essential if you want to truly move your business forwards.

Elizabeth is an excellent coach, facilitor and mentor and she explained that when your head, heart and gut are in alignment that business is easy. Get truly inspired about your vision, your goals and where you’re headed and getting there will be a pleasure.

Anyone can graft, but that makes business difficult. Find your inspiration and you’ll make achieving your goals (more of) a breeze.

And so Elizabeth took us through a number of exercises to get us thinking hard about our values, why we run the businesses that we do and what success will look like at the end of next year. As with last year, I know we all left her session incredibly inspired, invigorated and with a real sense of empowerment.

Ok, so that’s what you want to achieve, how will we get there?

The post coffee and mince pies session was all about checking in with the brand. Re-examining that you still have the right spot in the market, exploring how to innovate in changing market conditions and (a fair bit of time on) pricing. We reminded ourselves that you cannot supply the best product with the best service and be the cheapest! And so there might be a fair bit of realignment going on with some of our guests from yesterday.

I had the group define what they wanted to be known for and the message they wanted to communicate to their ideal clients, which is so key in streamlining your marketing efforts.

After lunch and our riverside networking walk we focused on communication. There is so much noise around what you should and could be doing, but what’s right for you? We explored how to tell which marketing activities to pursue and which to shelve. We also created tailored communication plans as well as looking at general background activity to maintain a profile.

Each and every one of our lovely guests had very different goals – from getting their first clients to launching a franchise offering and everything in between! But we got through a huge amount and I’m really looking forward to seeing what 2012 holds for this lovely bunch. We are running a second workshop on 12th January so if you’re kicking yourself for missing out on yesterday, why don’t you join us in the new year for what promises to be a day filled with inspiration, rejuvenation and focus?

More details on the website http://www.flourishstudios.co.uk

It’s around this time of year that most of us start looking forwards to what we’d like to get out of our businesses next year. And ahead of the first of my Focus and Flourish workshops I have been mulling over a question I ask myself a lot: what does success look like to me?

We live in a society where the trappings of success (and the sacrifices it takes to get there) are all too obvious. And at face value, it seems that we are all after the same thing. But are we really?

I think one of the things that the small business owners I know are very good at, is defining what success means to them.

Forget everyone else’s definition of success: what’s yours?

For one of my friends, her definition of business success is doing something she loves whilst at the same time being able to pay the school fees. For another, it’s about being able to match her city salary (whilst also doing what she loves). Another friend and I were looking at her business plan and goals from 2003 and were knocked sideways at how she’d achieved each and every one of her goals with bells on. And yet in the daily grind of running a business it’s easy to lose sight of what you have achieved.

I was at a seminar a couple of weeks ago where the speaker was geeing us up to think about Super-Success. His personal definition was Financial Freedom (whatever that means to you) and he talked several times about his “very nice lifestyle”. I have no idea of his own personal wealth, but I’d hazard a guess that it’s at the very least in the millions. I sat there listening to what he had to say, all very valid stuff, and I thought, “actually, if this is what it takes, I’m ok thanks.”

You see he made no bones about the fact that to be “super successful” you need to make some big sacrifices. He travels a lot, he works long hours, and from the sounds of things, he works at the weekends too. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, but I have made the very conscious decision that’s not for me.

And this is where I think your definition of success needs to be tied into your personal values. Success for you is how you define it. It could be to do with money, it could be wellbeing, it could be enjoying your job, it could be about how much time and flexibility you are able to bring into your life. I suspect that you, like me, can’t have it all. And I suspect that if you can get clear in your mind what you want to achieve next year, reconcile that with your personal values and ensure you’re comfortable with it, that you’ll be halfway there.

The fact is that there is no one-size fits all when it comes to defining success. But I do think it’s important to think about it. Really think about it. Not just pluck an arbitrary number out of thin air with no realistic planning about whether it’s achievable: but to actually think through what you want to achieve, how the market has changed and the steps you need to plan to get there.

And this is why I brought Elizabeth into the Focus and Flourish workshop - because whilst I do all the practical marketing stuff, she has the innate ability to get us all to focus on what we want and tie that back into our personal values. It’s an incredibly inspiring experience, and one that I’d love you to join us on if you can make it. We have a couple of spaces left on our 12th Jan workshop so come and join us, get Focused and then plan to Flourish!

Either way, do just take five minutes out to really focus on what success looks like for next year. It’ll be time really well spent.

Above: Kate Griffin‘s mood board. The photographer that didn’t want to be photographed – oooh the irony!

I love running our branding workshops. I love the combination of creativity and tangible business benefits that come out of the day, and the way that people walk in with a slightly muddled head around what their business brand is all about (some of them realise it, some of them don’t…) and they leave with absolute clarity. The journey that they go on is so inspiring, and it’s hard not to be caught by the infectiousness of the enthusiasm for their businesses.

The latest branding workshop started out much as most of my workshops do. Clarity and focus around what your brand is all about. We looked at brand values, brand personality and customer archetypes. I got them to think hard about how they carve out a meaningful niche in the market, and pennies began to drop. One of the most exciting things to happen at this point was lovely photographer Kate Griffin, who floated a concept for a marketing ploy that we realised would make a phenomenal niche: storybook photography in it’s truest sense. Kate’s plan is to write stories for the children she photographs. Beautiful!

This is an incredibly defendable niche for Kate. She writes beautifully. I mean truly, goose-pimplingly wonderful stuff that deserves to be read in its own merit as opposed to simply fluffing out a blog post full of gorgeous images. Kate loves to write, she’s good at it, and my sense is that her ideal clients would really buy into an heirloom product that combines images and a bespoke story.

The thing that I think is most exciting about this, is that Kate has the power to really carve out a niche for herself that will really help her business thrive. Sure, she needs a decent marketing plan to back it up, but she’s done much of the hard work by finding herself a powerful niche.

After lunch (yum – there was plenty of deliciousness from our lovely caterer Jilly) we knuckled down to mood boarding. I love how even the most cynical client becomes inspired, enlightened and enthused by this process. Mood boarding is all about “getting out” what you think and feel subconsciously about your brand. It’s not as hippy as I’ve just made it sound, I promise! And it really does help the creative process when it comes to designing a brand identity.

I loved all of the mood boards our guests made. From Flowerona’s vision for next year to Juliette of Fresh Air Fix’s insight into how she can make her blog more engaging, aspirational and “her” to Kate’s manifestation of her concept. I love them! And I can’t wait to start get my hands on the design…

Juliette Dyke of Fresh Air Fix and Rona Wheeldon of Flowerona proudly showing their new mood boards

The next branding workshop is taking place in April and spaces will be limited so I’d encourage you to book as soon as possible. Alternatively, why not join us for our month-long Branding Your Small Business e-class that starts on 6th February? It’s going to be a lot of fun, and we’ll cover everything our branding workshop guests covered plus a whole host of extra goodies that I’ll be able to squeeze in because we have so much more time.