You can hold a product you’re proud of. Most websites, you just put up with.

I’m a storyteller. I build brands for a living.

Our flagship is an Italian consumer brand. I’ve spent years studying Italian aesthetics and the codes of luxury: why some things feel expensive before you’ve even touched them.

We design our own products, packaging and campaigns. We file our own trademarks, dozens of them. So I look at a brand from every angle.

When our product is in your hand, you’re proud of it. Online was always where it fell short. I’d look at our site and say “it looks good.” I was never proud of it.

I am now.

Here’s why that took so long, and why it probably applies to you.

In this note 9 parts

1. Sound familiar?
2. A thousand details
3. The words
4. Pictures
5. What you put around you
6. Why it matters
7. No expert needed
8. Where I come from
9. Get in touch

Sound familiar?

• “Ignore the website, we’re redoing it.”
• You send people your LinkedIn instead of your site.
• You paid for a theme, then paid again to fix it.
• You wrote your own About page at midnight.
• A competitor’s site made you wince, because it’s better.

Me too. Every one of them.

Death by a thousand details

Most websites start from a template: a theme off a marketplace, or a Squarespace or Wix layout. Then the work starts.

I’ve bought themes for a few hundred pounds and spent thousands more trying to get them right. They never looked quite right, because they were designed for someone else.

The font is almost right. The spacing is a little off. The photos don’t match. The logo sits awkwardly.

None of it matters on its own. Together, the site never looks as good as the business behind it.

The words matter as much as the look

Whoever builds your site can only work with what you hand over: your copy, your bio, your description of what you do.

Most people aren’t writers. So it becomes a chatbot draft. It reads well the first time. Then you notice everyone else’s reads the same way.

Scroll LinkedIn and it feels like chatbots commenting on chatbots. People can tell, and they want real.

And nobody reads a wall of text. Online, every word has to earn its place.

So we write it for you. You talk; we draw the story out of you, keep it short, and make you sound like the hero of it.

Pictures do half the talking

A site is only as good as its pictures. For most people that means a few phone shots and an old headshot.

If yours aren’t there yet, we’ll make you images you can be proud of to launch with.

Then we’ll tell you exactly what to commission from a photographer, so the real shoot is quick and worth every penny.

You are what you put around you

The suit you wear to the meeting. The restaurant you book. The car you pull up in. People read all of it before you say a word.

Your website works the same way, except it’s doing the talking when you’re not in the room.

Walk past Harrods and the windows sell the store before you set foot inside. Your site is your shop window. It should make people want to come in.

Why it matters

People judge a website’s look in about 50 milliseconds, and that snap judgement holds up after a longer look.¹

In a Stanford study, nearly half of people judged a site’s credibility partly on its design.²

Before a meeting, a hire or a first order, people look you up, usually on a phone. Even after they’ve met you, they still look you up.

It’s the one part of a first impression you fully control. You don’t need a big following. You need to look like the person or brand they’d want to work with.

You don’t need to be an expert

That’s the whole point. You bring four things:

• Your materials, however rough.
• What you want the site to achieve.
• What you like, and what you don’t.
• A site you love: “If mine looked half as good as that, I’d be happy.”

That’s our benchmark. Then we go past it.

If nobody can picture what happy looks like, nobody can deliver it. So show us. It’s the quickest way to work with us, and the easiest.

Where I come from

I’m a Londoner. I started in print, on shoots that ran in Vogue, GQ and Elle.

I’ve spent half my working life between London and America. I know how American brands sell, and I bring a European eye and an Italian brand’s sense of craft to the work.

That’s what Stun Media is: your agents in visual persuasion.