Fenwick’s Future
Our Rebrand, Part 3
My favorite thing about the rebrand is its decisiveness. For nearly five years running, this company has been all improvisation. This moment marks the first time we’ve peered ahead and charted a course. I’m pleased to find it veers off the beaten path into the woods.
We’ve decided we aren’t an agency. We’re a writing studio, and that signifies something very different—it means we are free to go deep. Our employees are now part-owners. They are encouraged to select topics that thrill them, and that freedom imbues their work with a depth of feeling I have not seen elsewhere in business. Readers and clients sense the difference.
This craving to do meaningful work was always there, but it took form when Carina, then Morgan, and then Riviera joined the team. It’s been sculpted by our wonderful contract collaborators Caroline and Clarissa. Each possesses such varied strengths and brings their full personality into their work. It’s what gave rise to our new mission:
by telling enduring stories.
That mission is what leads us to write ebooks for cybersecurity companies that draw their titles from Yeats poems. Or a white paper for a real estate software firm which owes its theme to the philosopher Alfred Korzybski’s admonition, “The map is not the territory.”
Our mission leads us to infuse our clients’ communications with new perspectives—like finding females or people of color to complement an otherwise all-male interview lineup, or asking, “Is this stance too Eurocentric”?
Our mission manifests in design that’s more than garnish. For an ebook about inbound sales reps (which draws its philosophy from the book Antifragile, which I recommend), Clarissa came up with a maze theme that both guides the eye and provides a spine-tingling element of suspense. It’s a far cry from the stock templates you find online.
And our mission manifests as guides that readers actually want to read. Consider Carina’s series on topics like DevOps and Kanban. As her editor, I learned things. I was sometimes so lost in Taiichi Ohno’s story that I had to remember my job and revisit passages.
Where is it all headed? To a more perfect method of writing and design for business. As part of the rebrand, we’re doubling down on codifying the processes that have made us successful and have (sometimes) helped us avoid the eleventh-hour edits or politicking that drag projects out of scope and beyond budget. As one client mused on a call recently, “It feels like nobody in content marketing knows what they’re doing.” Indeed. Ourselves included. I want Fenwick to fix that.
As a first step, we’re looking within. We’re getting more selective about the projects we take on. It’s become clear that some clients have been so demanding they detracted from our work for others. To give our best to all, we now:
Only accept clients when we are uniquely prepared to tell their story (if you’re reading this and are a client, worry not. That’s you!)
Operate on a generous timeline that allows our creators to do their best work
Only take clients after an opportunity to study them and their audience
Give preference to ongoing projects that afford us many iterations
Do not tolerate divas
When all else is equal, we favor:
Relationships over contracts
Quality over speed
Contemplation over activity
Iteration over singular projects
Boldness always
In addition, we’re following our mission to its logical conclusion and taking “achieve greatness” to mean goodness for society too. As writers, we have a responsibility to report things faithfully. If we don’t—if all that writers in business produce is propaganda—it distorts the world. And if the great majority of writing occurs within, for, and by businesses, what better place to be telling better stories?
I’ll concede that this lofty goal is still mostly an aspiration. I can’t claim we’ve had that impact yet. But it’s what we want. We’re educating ourselves on topics and perspectives that matter to humanity and yet often go unaddressed in business. Diversity is much more than selecting stock photos that feature minorities. For instance, who designed your app? Who produced your collateral? Who wrote your white papers? Who crafted your messaging architecture? We need all of those creators to come from many backgrounds and mindsets. At Fenwick, if we play an active role in helping clients plan their communications, select speakers, and choose their words, we can help them make the world more equitable.
I find the idea inspiring, and I see this launch as a way to foster a work environment where we can all build a career, master our craft, and bottle lightning. The results have already begun to show in our client work:
An SDR sequence we wrote for one client raised open rates from 4% to 78%, and click-through rates from 1% to 34%.
A campaign we helped write and design landed one public company 268 meetings.
An article and infographic we wrote generated $15,000 in leads on the very first day, without promotion.
A course we wrote for a client hit its two-month goal of 400 signups by the third day.
As we hone these skills, we have Isabella Fenwick firmly in mind. I am always conscious that though these results are exciting, they aren’t ours. Like Isabella, we’re actively uninterested in accolades. The opportunity to pursue mastery is its own gift. And now that we’re a team, it’s a gift we can extend to organizations that can’t afford to pay.
Fenwick now donates 1% of profits to environmental causes and, more exciting, donates five hours per employee per quarter to helping nonprofits achieve the same breakout results as our for-profit clients. Some of our efforts have gone to Wikipedia, where Carina wrote our namesake Isabella Fenwick back into history, and Riviera is writing for the Black Lives Matter Wikiproject. They’re both writing for Women in Red, which focuses on women’s representation on Wikipedia. I’ve spent time helping a non-profit who The New York Times hails as among the most effective, halt the loss of rainforests.
I’m thrilled by the cohesion. I’m invigorated by our team's refined purpose. And I’m excited to see where we are in five year’s time. My hope is that Fenwick will produce a more perfect method for writing and design in business—one that helps companies stand out, speak up, and give back by being more thoughtful in their communication.
APPENDIX
As part of our mission, we’re open-sourcing what works for us, including our formula for inspired writing. Please. Steal it. The world could use more good.
