The Service Edit

“We’d never done email before Mel approached us. With the cost of living it had gone quiet, and the start of this year was the slowest we’d had. She started in March. Our Wednesdays are now the busiest they’ve been all year and July was our biggest month on the app. We handed her the website and the emails, and they work as one thing now, which I don’t think happens when two different people are doing them. She checked every page and every send on her own phone first, which seemed like overkill until I thought about where our bookings actually come from. She writes them like someone who’s worked in hospitality, because she has.”

“We have been finding venues since 1989 and the site looked it. Mel sent a live link every time, so we were looking at the real thing instead of trying to picture it, and anything she needed from us came as a list. This photo, this bit of copy, this number. We did our part and it moved. It looks like 2026 now and it still sounds like us, which is the part I didn’t think we’d get.”

“Mel found us. We weren’t looking for a website, we were flat out running a café, and she’d been watching the brand grow and worked out there was nowhere for anyone to actually find us. She turned up with the concept already there. What she built feels exactly like Giant, which is the part I didn’t expect. It’s us, on a screen.”

“It was only five days from our first conversation to the whole thing being live. I kept waiting for the part where it gets hard and it never came. She’d send a round back with everything marked up so I could see what she’d changed, and she’d already know what she needed from me next. She went all in on the concept. More than I would have for someone else’s business, honestly. I’m not a website person and I never once felt like I was the one holding it up.”