AVRE case study: the brand PressWhisper was built for

I built something to destroy the PR agency model. And guess what. It fucking works.

Al Murray stood in front of The Scotsman this week and poured our whisky. A live tasting. Vat 01, 265 bottles, one for every Commando who sailed on the St Nazaire raid, signed by Al and James Holland. No agency. No retainer. A press kit and an email. I built the thing and I still said holy crap out loud.

AVRE is my brand. I co-founded it with Al Murray and James Holland two years ago. The whole idea of the brand was to hand-make rare WWII jackets, in limited numbers, with materials as close to the originals as possible, sourced in the UK. Oh, and we would give 10% of the profits away to veterans' charity. Why? Because the originals had lasted a war and three generations, so they wouldn't just fill landfill.

I thought this was a great story, worth really shouting about. So I asked some PR agencies what it would cost. I was quoted on average £5k per month with a minimum six-month retainer. For what? A charming senior PR account manager that I would rarely hear from, who would pass my account on to an intern who has access to a Muck Rack subscription. For them to mass-blast our beloved brand to journalists that don't even cover that beat. I was so cross and frustrated I decided to do something myself. If you know me you will know that I get obsessive, and so I looked at the problem and it struck me as twofold.

One: mass blasting doesn't work. The average broadsheet journalist gets 280 PR emails a day and is basically treated as an email entry rather than a human with a job.

Two: most companies, me included, could not create a compelling press kit or pitch. (Before we built Presswhisper I sent the AVRE story to loads of journalists thinking that is all you had to do, I got zero response rate).

Our solve:

One: journalists are an endangered species. And full disclosure, we use AI. Ahhhh, shock horror, but I think in a good way. We have contextualised every single journalist. What do I mean by that? We look at their last 100 articles and try to understand what they write about, why they write about it, what their political leaning is, who they are as a journalist. Our goal is to treat journalists as humans who also need to benefit from a PR platform, not just be mass-blasted.

Two: the press kit. Most founders think they know the perfect story that journalists want. They don't. They know the story of their product or service. What makes it different. So they end up sending a marketing pitch and wonder why their 'story' is not pitched. What we do is help you create a press kit that is built in a way that not only allows you to edit different parts to have multiple press kits, but also provides third-party backlinks that make you more visible to SEO and AI. Ummmm, that seems like a no-brainer (especially when you can build that part for FREE).

BUT we also build your press kit with a difference: we scan the news cycle and help you create a trending angle that a journalist can pick up on. Finally, we bring both bits together so that we can mathematically match you and do a sniper shot rather than a mass blast. Which we find gets better results. But back to AVRE, as this was my test guinea pig.

AVRE was always the test.

If it couldn't get a small heritage brand into the right magazines, it was snake oil, and I'd have been the one selling it. So here is what it actually did.

On 27 August at 07:57 the deck shirt pitch went out. By 11:00 the editor of Men's File had replied, and the first thing he wanted was a close-up of the selvedge. By 14:35 the man who runs Delayed Gratification, a magazine whose entire point is that nothing happens quickly, had written "Right up my street" and asked to interview James. Two of the most particular editors in Britain said yes to a denim shirt before the afternoon was out.

That's not a mailshot. Each of them got an email that opened with the piece they'd just published, and a kit that answered every question before they asked it. Which is all a £30k agency does, except the agency takes six weeks and bills you for the intern. The whisky was our first "it fucking works" moment. Beat Magazine came back within a day of the pitch. It then took me two months to get Al in a room. The article ran on the 31st of May.

Then The Scotsman. Vat 01: Commandos who trained in Ayr, a destroyer named after a whisky town, Remembrance Sunday on the way. On 21 October Al did a live tasting for Scotland's broadsheet.

Four doors, four yeses, none of it a paid advertorial, and every line above has a timestamp I can show you.

"You would say that, it's your own brand." Yes. It's the brand I built this for. And it works.

One more thought for consideration.

If you've been quoted £5k+ for emails and are annoyed with the transparency and the made-up numbers, maybe give PressWhisper a go? For £2.5k you can do the White Glove service, which has a 100% guarantee or full refund. How many PR firms do you know that will do that?

If you fancy a jacket and are not sure AVRE is even real - here is the shop and here is AVRE's press release