Brilly’s Tone of Voice Guide: How a sports bra brand with a patent, lab results, and too many ways to describe itself found its positioning, its voice, and a customer journey that carried women from “not another sports bra” to checkout.
Claudio Storelli’s team designed their sports bra the way you’d design a trail-running backpack. You cinch a good backpack so the weight sits exactly where you want it, loosen it off for a walk, tighten it up for a run, and adjust each side on its own. When Claudio first told me about it, he described the moment the idea clicked as a slightly mad realisation: “we’re sending people to Mars”, and women with bigger busts still can’t get a sports bra that’s comfortable.
So they engineered one. It wraps around you, each side adjusts independently (because nobody is perfectly symmetrical), and in lab testing it outperformed every sports bra on the market. They called it Brilly, because the product is clever and they wanted the brand to be a little bit clever too.
Plenty of ways to describe it, none that landed
Claudio had the patent and the test results. He also had a problem. “I have many ways of describing what this does,” he told me on our first call, “but we need a way to nail it.”
The science was the obvious place to start, and the trouble was that the test results were, in his words, “very dry”. Look at how everyone else sold sports bras, and you got two options. At one end, the hardcore athlete running two marathons back-to-back. At the other, women having pillow fights with clouds in the background. Neither was the woman Brilly was for: “the smart, busy woman who squeezes a workout when she can”, then picks up the kids, grabs a coffee and meets her friends for brunch, all in the same bra.
Underneath it all was why the brand needed to exist. Women had told the team they’d stopped doing certain workouts, or stopped working out at all, because of what happened to their chest. Claudio wanted a brand that told them “you don’t have to hide, just go do it”, and put a smile on their face while it did. (He was also very clear it shouldn’t be pretentious. He hates pretentiousness.)
Finding the space between the lab report and the pillow fight
We started with strategy, because a voice with no position behind it is just a nice tone.
Everyone on the team filled in the brand discovery questionnaire. There were no customer interviews to draw on yet, so I went message mining for the words women with bigger busts already use about their sports bras: the uniboob, the straps digging in, wearing two or three bras at once, and the sweaty fight to get the thing off afterwards. The competitor research showed brands promising comfort or support or style, and nobody claiming all three at once, so that became Brilly’s ground.
The positioning gave Brilly a cause. Brilly rebels against bad bras on behalf of all women, and its lead message puts the blame where it belongs: “Your body is right, the garment is wrong.” Angela, Brilly’s fractional CMO, called the “on behalf of all women” idea “a powerful connective tissue community statement”, and summed up the strategy better than I could: “We want to create the community out of these people, not just spray and pray.”
A voice that can explain engineering over a martini
Then we ran a brand voice workshop with the whole team, sorting a long list of tone words into the essentials, the nice-to-haves and a pile we called “no, heck no”.
Brilly came out as a blend of two voice types. The Translator handles the science, so a patented engineering design becomes something you’d happily read on your phone in the queue for coffee. The Friend at the Bar keeps it human, a bit cheeky, and on your level (the Guide describes it as chuckling at the bar over a couple of martinis). Claudio had asked for copy that would “smirk like your clever, smart, cool friend”, and this is the voice that does it. The never list mattered just as much: Brilly is never embarrassed (boobs are natural, and the language says so) and never judgmental, because every body is worthy of a bra that fits.
Who she is, and what she needs to hear when
The first draft of the personas talked about bodies changing through the month, and Angela pushed us wider. Bodies change across a whole life, and a bra that adjusts can go with you through all of it, which also gives a customer a reason to come back for a new size. So the personas follow life stages: before children, pregnancy, postpartum, mums wrangling small children, perimenopause and menopause, and the women who practically live in their running kit. Each one has her own story and her own reasons to need Brilly.
Then we mapped the key messages to where she is in the buying journey. When she’s fed up but not looking, “Your body is right, the garment is wrong” and “We ripped up the rulebook” are there to stop the scroll. When she’s comparing options, the Translator steps in with science-backed support and engineered comfort for real life. When she’s ready to decide, “Move freely, live fully” shows her what changes, with the science repeated for reassurance.
Putting the strategy to work
The Positioning, Messaging and Tone of Voice Guide became the brief for everything that followed, and Brilly’s team brought me back for most of it.
The homepage and product page follow that same journey: the problems she recognises, how each one is solved by the design, everyday use cases from the school run to the sofa, and a route into the full engineering for readers who want the geeky detail. An ad landing page and personas for their ad campaigns came next.
Angela expected most people to need a few visits to the site before they bought, so the welcome email sequence was built to carry them there. Six emails move from Brilly’s story to real wearers, then the product, the engineering, a day in the life, and finally the guarantee, which opens on a line that came straight out of Angela’s comments on the Guide: “We get it, you’ve been burnt before.”
Then came naming the product, its technology and the new category Brilly wanted to own. I built two complete naming architectures from category design principles and tested every name against the Guide, plus guardrails we agreed early on. Nothing that sounded like constrictive shapewear, nothing that told women what shape their bodies should be, nothing cutesy or patronising about bigger busts, and nothing that would sound odd coming from a friend at the bar. (One strong contender fell at the last hurdle, after a certain billionaire decided to rename a social network after the letter X. Naming is a contact sport.)
What the team said
Angela read the Guide slowly, leaving comments as she went, and told me on our feedback call:
“I feel like you really understand what I think we’ve all been trying to put into words.”
Angela, Brilly
Tyler said: “I felt like I knew what the brand was now, and the story we’re trying to tell… it really helped me kind of visualize it.” Tom’s verdict was that it “seems really spot on”.
Claudio read the whole thing within half an hour of it landing in his inbox and replied, “I just read through it and it’s awesome!” A few weeks later he emailed again: “we LOVED working with you and are so proud of your work. I have already bragged about you to a couple of fellow CEOs and will continue to do so.”
Got something brilliant and no way to nail it?
If you know your work is good (you might even have the proof), and every way you describe it comes out too dry or sounds like everyone else, a Brand Messaging Guide is where I’d start. It gives you the position, the voice and the messages, and a plan for which message goes where. Brilly’s went from first questionnaire to draft Guide in about two weeks.
Have a look here, or book a call and we’ll talk it through, no pressure or obligation.