A design studio for Stratford-upon-Avon.
We're fifteen minutes up the road at Hatton, which means meeting in person is a normal Tuesday rather than a logistical exercise. Stratford also has a rare problem: a brand so famous it belongs to somebody else. Every business here trades in the shadow of Shakespeare, and the good ones work out how to benefit from that without disappearing into it.
Start a projectHeritage is an asset, not a costume
The lazy version of a Stratford brand is mock-Tudor lettering and a quill. It signals the town rather than the business, and it makes a serious company look like a gift shop.
The better move is to take heritage seriously without imitating it. Quality, craft and a long view are all genuinely Shakespearean values, and none of them require a single piece of blackletter type.
The visitor economy is a design problem
Millions of visitors a year, most of whom decide where to eat, stay and shop in the moment, on a phone, having never heard of you before that morning. That's an unusually pure test of a brand.
It also means your website is doing hard commercial work under bad conditions: patchy signal, small screen, someone standing in the rain deciding between you and the place next door. Fast pages aren't a technical nicety here, they're the difference.
Working with cultural organisations
George is co-founder of Talesmith, a product business built in partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company. So the particular demands of working with a cultural institution, the committees, the guardianship of a reputation older than anyone in the room, are familiar rather than theoretical.
Hospitality and independents
Hotels, restaurants, bars and independent retail, where the brand carries a lot of weight in a small space and there's rarely the budget to get it wrong twice.
Common questions
- Do you work with hospitality and tourism businesses in Stratford?
- Yes. Hospitality is one of our core sectors, and the visitor economy in Stratford is close to a pure test of whether a brand works: people who have never heard of you, deciding in the moment, on a phone.
- Have you worked with cultural organisations?
- Yes. George is co-founder of Talesmith, a product business built in partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company, so working within a cultural institution's constraints is familiar territory.
- Is G&Co based in Stratford-upon-Avon?
- Close to it. The studio is at Hatton, just outside Warwick, about fifteen minutes from Stratford. Meeting in person is straightforward, and for brand work we'd encourage it.