Dressed for Success
How, and why, I relaunched a Managing Director into the public eye.
Nearly three years ago, I was introduced to Charlotte Stiffell, a uniform designer well known by name in places such as Savile Row and Canary Wharf, but perhaps less so outside the world she had spent more than fifteen years building. I initially came in to support her marketing, but after getting to know Charlotte, her business and her clients, I felt there was much more to work with. The company already had the reputation, heritage and commercial relationships. What interested me was the woman behind it. My view was quite simple: rather than just marketing uniforms, I wanted to reintroduce Charlotte herself to the public. One of my initial ideas was an editorial.
I arranged an interview with Maurice Mullen, former Head of Fashion and Luxury at the London Evening Standard and ES Magazine, for the Spring 2025 issue of I-M Magazine. Charlotte went on to head the Business section with a six-page print feature. This was quite deliberate. I-M circulated 25,000 copies through private members’ clubs, luxury hotels and other locations where the people reading it could realistically become clients, collaborators or introductions. Charlotte supplies made-to-measure uniforms to corporate and hospitality teams, so there was little point pursuing exposure simply because it was exposure. I wanted her in front of the right people, and I wanted the interview to move her away from simply being presented as a Managing Director and towards the creative mind behind the garments. The same thinking informed the photography and film we produced. Before deciding how Charlotte should look publicly, I needed to understand her properly: her history, her taste, how she worked and why her clients liked working with her. The visual world therefore came directly from her own environment. Fabric swatches, mannequins, jackets, fittings and construction became recurring parts of the imagery. I never wanted it to feel like a generic corporate shoot. Uniform is already a very specific, commercially driven industry, so showing some personality was important. Charlotte is founder-led in the truest sense of the word. A great deal of the business comes down to people trusting her judgement and enjoying working with her, so the content needed to communicate that as much as it communicated the clothes. From there, it became a question of consistency. LinkedIn gave us a way to bring Charlotte into the conversation more regularly and generated over 70,000 impressions in the first year. Newsletters became less about simply announcing a jacket or collection and more about giving people a reason to understand the work behind it. Photography, editorial, email and social all had different jobs, but they were working towards the same thing: showing both the product and the person responsible for it. I never saw the project as inventing a new Charlotte Stiffell. Quite the opposite. My job was to understand what was already there, decide what deserved more attention and find the right places to put it. 1st Image: Photographed by James Abel 2nd Image: Photographed by Debbi Clark. Hair - Julia Hopkins, MUA - Arancia
