Blending the powers of creative thinking and technology to revolutionise a copywriter's brand presence.
Brand Strategy
Creative Direction
Visual Identity
Brand Elements + Patterns
Brand Guidelines
Web Design + Development
A lot of the copywriting world is hyper-curated, hyper-professional and frankly, pretty boring. Most sound and look the same. Not Kori Whitby. There’s a grit and edge to her brand and personality that people appreciate. It’s barely a surprise that the people she tends to attract are (or think of themselves as) industry leaders or “rule breakers.”
After 2 years as a freelance copywriter, Kori’s business had changed and grown so much that she now felt boxed in by her current brand presence that we had created in 2021. Despite still earning her inquiries and compliments, her website therefore needed a big overhaul.
Kori wanted a site that could bring in consistent leads for her services and sales from her template shop, without needing tweaking for a long time.
Together, we decided to first update her current branding (also created by us 2 years prior) via a “Design Intensive”—a service with a one day turnaround. The focus of this update was to present her cheeky personality in a more refined and timeless way. This meant new colours and typefaces, extra brand patterns to facilitate content creation, and the addition of a brand mascot.
For the website, we took a more radical back-to-square-one approach and moved Kori from Showit to Webflow. This step gave us more tools to create an engaging experience for visitors via interactions. We used those mainly to keep readers’ attention—which is particularly important for a copywriter that has a lot to say.
What does a rat have to do with copywriting? Nothing. So why did an illustrated rat become the beloved mascot for Kori—not a typewriter or a book? Because the rodent uniquely tells a piece of her story. As a kid, Kori was practically on her knees, begging her parents to let her get pet rats. They said no. Fast forward to adulthood, and one of the first ‘grown-up’ decisions she made was to adopt a pair of rodent companions. This isn’t just a cute anecdote but a small window into Kori's character. It tells us that Kori has a strong sense of self. The ability to explore unconventional ideas, push back, and trust in her own abilities—they are all requirements to writing the most compelling copy. Therefore, the rat is a very personal and meaningful addition to her brand’s visual identity.
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Step one in the website creation process was to clarify the functions the website needed to fulfill. We held another in-depth call. This time with Kori's OBM joining, seeing that she's dealing with the operational side of the business. After exploring multiple options and weighing pros and cons, we collectively concluded that Webflow was the best platform to achieve the robust, engaging, and creative digital home that Kori was after for her brand. However, we found that Webflow's native e-commerce capabilities wouldn't give Kori enough control over the buyer journey. In order to gain access to email segmentation, abandoned cart management, and upsells, we decided to host the digital products through Thrivecart—a software already utilised in Kori's business.
With the strategy defined and Kori's copy in hand, we began designing the homepage in Figma with a content-first approach. This ensured that the design would complement her words rather than dominate them. Following two rounds of feedback and final approval, we proceeded to design the other nine pages in a similar manner. After two more rounds of feedback and a total of four weeks, we started development in Webflow. This was done in collaboration with our resident Webflow developer Harry. We made use of the native CMS to make it easy for Kori to add blog posts and products on her own in the future. Overall, the website was built with longevity in mind—a need we had identified early on.
Kori had a successful template shop launch (💸) and her website was crowned “prettiest website ever” on Instagram (thanks, Sophie). Her rat mascot was not only fully embraced, it has turned out to be a real crowd pleaser and has risen to trademark status. The rat is now decorating phone cases, laptops, gift boxes, and more.
“Not only are they intuitive and strategic about branding, but they are so insanely talented and can bring any vision to life with clarity and expertise. They took my ideas and presented them to me in ways that made them 100 times better.”
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