How a brand-new idea (adopt a pistachio tree, share in its harvest) went from a pitch-deck sentence to a brand people could understand, trust and buy as a gift.

This is how Abdi Moinian first described his business to me: “A company that generates social, environmental & financial benefits by creating a new agro-farming crowd platform, where adoption of trees and investment in agriculture is made accessible to the masses.”

Every word of it is true. And unless you’d already decided to invest, you probably drifted off somewhere around “agro-farming”.

He knew it, too. When I asked what worried him most about talking to his audience, he said: “Them understanding the concept in a few seconds…how do we get them interested?”

That rare thing – a new idea, but only a few seconds to explain it

MyTreehood lets people adopt a tree on an organic farm, follow how it’s growing, and take a share of what it produces, either as income or (eventually) as the harvest itself. You could be closer to nature without having to buy a field or don wellies. You could start with just one tree.

There was a lot to fit into those few seconds. Abdi’s key messages covered the fun of adopting a tree, a way to diversify your investments, learning about orchards and agriculture, organic farming that’s good for the soil, a share of one of the healthiest nuts going, and jobs for the people who work the land. All of it mattered to him, and he was trying to say it all at once.

Two very different people, one tree

The audience research narrowed Abdi’s “anyone, really” into two people with very different reasons to buy.

The first I called the Non-Conformist. She has money to invest and no interest in taking the traditional route. She wants her investments to be environmentally and socially credible, she’s nervous about risk in a new area, and (honestly) she’d quite like something better to talk about at parties than her pension.

The second was the Thoughtful Gifter, looking for a present that isn’t mass-produced, that shows she put some thought in, and that lasts longer than a box of chocolates. She may not know much about investing at all, and she’s not really interested in learning loads about it right now.

The same research turned up three reasons either of them might walk away:

• trust and financial risk,
• not understanding how it works (the investing or the farming),
• and a healthy suspicion of anything calling itself “green”.

Everyone else was telling one story

Then I looked at where else those people might go.

• Treedom sold tree gifts with a personal touch
• Ecologi was all about doing good for the planet, with no investment angle at all
• Ecotree talked about sustainable forestry
• The Walnut Fund focused on the money, leaning on jargon like “generational wealth” and “democratize investments” to sound credible.

The other brands were each telling one story about trees. MyTreehood could tell the whole story (the money and the meaning) without the jargon.

So the Brand Messaging Guide set out a voice that was educational, friendly and fun, and three key messages to carry everything else:

• Invest in something more interesting than tech stocks, and more tangible than bitcoin
• Get closer to your food
• Do something good for the planet with your money

It also set out how to answer the three barriers.

• Explain the whole process, from handing over your money to the end of your tree’s life, as simply as possible
• Use trust markers (partnerships, credentials, clear numbers on risk and return, behind-the-scenes content from the orchards)
• And be honest about farming’s environmental limits, because that’s what makes the green claims believable

Trees with Benefits

Then we put the Guide to work on the website, including my favourite headline I’ve ever written.

When the site launched, the homepage spoke to both buyers. For the Non-Conformist, a section called “Break free from boring” asked why you’d invest like your grandad. For the Thoughtful Gifter, there was a gift route right there on the homepage. “Farm without the wellies” brought in the part about getting closer to your food. And “How it works” walked through the whole thing in five plain steps, from choosing your tree to receiving your share of the harvest, because the Guide said the simpler the explanation, the more likely people are to trust it.

A long-lasting investment

The Brand Messaging Guide gave MyTreehood a clear sense of who it’s talking to and what they need to hear, so that three years on, every new piece of work still has something to stand on.

Over the last 3 years, Abdi and I have used it to build social media strategies, reach out to influencers, and create a gifting guide.

So more people can get closer to the soil (without wellies), and munch on their very own pistachio nuts!

Got an idea that’s hard to explain in a sentence?

If you’ve built something that does lots of good things at once, there’s a fair chance your audience is getting all of them at the same time (and remembering none of them). A Brand Messaging Guide sorts out who your thing is really for, what they need to hear first (the rest can wait), and how to show them they can trust you.

Have a look at the Brand Messaging Guide here, or book a call and we’ll talk it through, no pressure or obligation.

Carry on reading

How a coach with a decade of happy clients realised her message was no longer working, and how a messaging audit discovered what her audience needed to hear instead.

Pippa’s first message about working together was a lot like a lot of messages I get from people…steeped in frustration that her business didn’t fit traditional marketing “rules”.

She’d been told, by more than one person, that a mastermind needs to promise specific, tangible results. She agreed with that in principle, she said, but also “I’ll be buggered if I can articulate the results.”

A decade of happy clients and no way to say why

Pippa runs The Disobedient Business Co. with Lucy, and the Disobedient Business Mastermind is the main event. It’s for ADHD and autistic business owners who’ve been at it a while. People join and then stay. One member had been there since September 2021, and others for well over two years. Pippa knew it worked, partly because “none of the people that are in the mastermind are dickheads, and they wouldn’t stick around if we weren’t doing something right.”

The trouble was selling it. She wanted to get it back to being “an easy sell”, and she told me straight that it was “def not landing in the current marketplace at all.”

The advice she’d been given was to hang the Mastermind on one thing, so it became a sales mastermind or a launch mastermind. But that was too narrow for what the Mastermind does, and a bit disingenuous. She was stuck.

Which was why she needed me.

Five years of tweaking at the edges

She’d written the messaging a couple of years earlier, and since then she’d tinkered with different sections, sharpening and tweaking, without changing the structure underneath.

She could feel the gap, too. “We’re definitely missing the mark in terms of speaking to people the way that they need to hear things now, as opposed to maybe the way they needed to hear them in 22, 23.” She needed some kind of golden thread that would run through everything – something suited to the new context we found ourselves in in 2025 – a bin fire globally, cost of living crisis nationally, and everyone in the online business world finding selling more difficult.

Send me everything

The Messaging Reset is a week-long messaging audit for businesses whose messaging used to work and has stopped landing. I work out what’s still doing its job and what’s drifted, then map out what to say first (and who to say it to) right now, in a doc you can copy and paste straight from.

It starts with me reading everything, and I mean everything. Pippa took me at my word. She sent the website pages, her welcome email, a filtered view of every email she’d sent since April, her draft framework, onboarding answers from Mastermind members, a testimonials spreadsheet she was embarrassed about, and a brand-new doc she’d pulled together that morning.

Then we talked it through on a kickoff call, and I sorted what her people were dealing with into three groups.

• There’s their brain, and the judgment, self-doubt and shame that come from being told one-size-fits-all and finding it doesn’t fit.
• There are their ethics, and the bro marketing, manipulative tactics and toxic productivity they keep being told they need.
• And there’s the vibe they’re looking for, which is a space where they can be themselves and find people like them.

Her voice was already doing its job for all three, and that part of the Reset map simply says “Do Not Touch!” The humour, the swearing and the generosity of it all stayed exactly where they were.

What needed work was the order things were said in, and who they were said to.

Knackered, and just trying to stay upright

Pippa’s people were the same ADHD and autistic business owners, allergic to blueprints and drawn to her for the same reasons as ever. What had changed was their context.

The old messaging assumed a reader who was angry and ready to burn it all down. Five years ago they wanted to rage against the system. Now they’re knackered, and just trying to stay upright. Most had spent a lot of money on coaches and programmes, and the cost of living had made every decision feel heavier. What they wanted to know was whether this could finally work for them.

Yes, they still wanted the world and unjust systems to change. But this Mastermind couldn’t just give them that – it actually had to make their business work, too. They were in a “put your own oxygen mask on first” situation.

So the Reset moved the lead from rebellion to relief. The core shift went from “This is a space for business rule-breakers” to “This is where your business finally works, because it’s shaped around your brain, not someone else’s formula.”

What you put in place of the rulebook

The ideal Mastermind member needs to believe two things before they’ll jump in:

• “You can help me get the results I want.”
• “I won’t have to leave part of me at the door to get them.”

Everything else in the map hangs off those two lines.

There’s a new value proposition for the Mastermind, the messages to lead with and the order to use them in, a clear signal that this is for people with three or more years in business, and a sales page opener written for someone who’s tired rather than furious. There are before-and-after rewrites of her existing copy, a swipe bank of lines she could lift straight into emails and posts, and five mini case studies built from what her members had already told her.

It all arrived as a Google Doc with a video walk-through, so she could copy and paste from it rather than squint at a shiny PDF.

“Ohhh, yeah that makes sense'”

“It all makes total sense,” she wrote, “and to be honest, both comfortingly and also fucking annoyingly (on me not you), 97% of it is stuff I’ve been circling for aggggges.”

That’s the bit I hear most often after a messaging audit. Most people have been circling the answer for a while, and they need someone outside the business to point at it and say yes, that one.

After years of the industry shouting about launch numbers and revenue, she’d come to believe her clients’ results were “too squishy” to count, even though she knew how much they mattered.

So we used the implementation call for exactly that. We triaged the sales page so the new messaging could go in without a full rewrite, planned content around each part of the messaging shift, and worked through how to show results from the testimonials and feedback she already had, without sounding “bro-ey”.

Seven weeks

The last time Pippa had torn her business down to start again, her website was offline for eighteen months.

This time she rewrote the whole thing, copy and design, in seven weeks. When she got to the two pages she’d been avoiding (the Mastermind page and the homepage), she brought me back in to red-pen the first and write the second. The Mastermind page she’d drafted was already a long way from the old one. It felt like a significant shift towards what the Mastermind offers, and the struggles her audience were dealing with right now, and I didn’t change much.

If you’re feeling nosey you can check out the copy we worked on here.

What Pippa said

A few months later, Pippa joined me on an Instagram live to talk about the Reset. Without being asked, she made the case for it better than I ever have.

“Downwards of a thousand quid, I cannot think of another thing that would be better to invest in at the moment. If you are not saying the right things to the right people in the right way… you can put all the content out in the world that you like and it’s gonna be an absolute load of nonsense.””

Pippa Parfait, The Disobedient Business Co.

Circling the same answer for a while?

If your business works, your clients stay, and you still can’t quite say what you do for them.

Or selling has gotten more difficult, but you’re not sure why.

A Messaging Reset is a messaging audit that keeps what’s working, shows you what’s drifted, and gives you the words to put your messaging back where your people are.

Have a look at The Messaging Reset, or book a call and we’ll talk it through.

Carry on reading

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.

(Check out Brilly’s website here)

Carry on reading