Case Study - Lava Spirits Co.

Lava Spirits Co. is a UK based coffee spirit manufacturer founded by Laura Bridge. The coffee gins are award-winning and since launch in August 2020, Laura has already been featured in GQ and Cosmopolitan. Laura and I worked together to create the web copy for her website and we have since worked on a press release and an advertorial piece in GQ magazine.

Foraging for ingredients

Laura was launching her new drinks’ brand, Lava Spirits Co. and was at the website building stage when we were first introduced. Her website was being built by my friend Tammy Jackson of For Cocktail Sake who kindly recommended me to write the web copy.

Laura Bridge, founder of Lava Spirit Co.

Distillation aka The Process

INTRODUCTIONS

Laura had already put her thoughts down on paper so I read through those but importantly , we also spent quite some time chatting over Zoom (of course, it would have been lovely to meet in person but this was a lockdown 2020 project). It’s always important for me to get to know my clients and especially so when writing web copy. I like to understand:

• About them

  • Who are they? What are they like? What’s their tone of voice? What makes them laugh?

  • Their career to date;

  • The motivation to launch their business.

• Their product or service

  • What is it and what does it do? How does it help?

  • The why behind it;

  • The target audience;

  • The market in which it sits.

After I’d spoken to Laura at length, I downloaded my thoughts and ideas onto paper in my notebook - any words and associated words that came to mind: spider diagrams; word trees; films, music or ‘celebrities’ that you might think of alongside Lava Spirits Co. Laura had already created a ‘soundtrack’ to her brand which she sent to me and it definitely evoked a particular mood.

All of this initial work (& sleep - I’m a great advocate of sleeping on things and letting the subconscious get to work!) helped me to start to formulate ideas - now I just needed to start crafting all these ideas and words into web copy that would work for the brand.

The writing

The writing of Lava Spirits Co. web copy involved weaving some of Laura’s own writing, thoughts and ideas in with my own to create web content that told the story of the brand and explained the product concisely whilst ensuring that Laura’s voice was present throughout.

I don’t normally do this but whilst writing, I was starting to imagine how the website might look to the public when finished. I requested the brand font and relevant graphics and mocked up the website’s pages. This helped me shape the web copy and I presented it all to Laura and Tammy.

I am no graphic designer but mapping out the words as if they were on a web page was a great tool to demonstrate my vision and to see the words as they might appear. My design features nowhere on the website, and rightly so, but it helped me to hone the finished product.

The editing

I would argue that there isn’t a single piece of writing that can’t be tweaked (even published writing, no matter how many proof readers and copy editors have been employed) so I always anticipate some to-ing and fro-ing between the client and me, and Laura wasn’t any different. We had regular conversations until we finalised the copy. We were on the ‘same page’ though, so the editing was more about word or phrase preferences than huge rewrites.

Having the first sip - the finished product!

And then there was the website reveal! This is always exciting as web functionality, design and web copy come together for the first time. More editing (see previous point on editing!) ensued as words need changing or moving so that they had the desired effect.

When the website went live, it was fantastic that Tammy and I had a very happy customer!

“As a new small business owner, I can’t recommend Caroline highly enough! Caroline really came to the fore when working on copy for my website. She nailed my ‘voice’ and tone of website without even meeting me in person! Great work and a delight to work with!” — Laura Bridge

Please do check out the website and definitely try Laura’s delicious gins!

Image copyright Laura Bridge / Lava Spirit Co.