8. The Wern
I thought Lucy Werner, PR expert, founder of The Wern and author of the book Hype Yourself would be an excellent person with whom to kick off 2021. If any of you are small business owners looking for ways to boost your visibility, Lucy is your woman.
Living and working in Clapton and with two young boys, Lucy is no stranger to the work/life juggle of the small business owner. She works from a (frankly incredible) office at the bottom of her garden alongside her partner, Hadrien. As Lucy puts it, he is “my creative director and co-founder of my children”.
Lucy’s approach to PR and marketing is quite creative, which is perhaps unsurprising, given she comes from a large and artistic family: “my siblings are brilliant creatives between photography, art, pottery, sewing - whichever art form they turn their hand to, they execute with great skill. I was always jealous that I couldn’t create something tangible in the same way, but over the years I’ve learnt that my creativity comes in the shape of ideas and strategy”
After a work placement aged 17, Lucy realised she was made for a career in PR and has never looked back. After freelancing for a few years, Lucy set up The Wern in 2015, having realised that small independent businesses weren’t getting the attention they deserved from the larger PR agencies.
She now channels her passion and skill into helping and empowering small independent businesses and sole traders to build and promote their brands themselves, saving them a fortune in the process. After four years of thinking about writing a book about it all, she was finally driven to get on and do it after winning a book deal through prolific business book expert Alison Jones.
“When I left PR agency land and set up shop, I started reading all the PR books in the Amazon charts and was dismayed that none were actually written by people who worked in publicity. Most were written by male journalists turned publicity experts, when the PR industry is dominated by women”.
Lucy was pregnant while she wrote the book, which gave her deadline slightly more urgency. “I treated each section like a series of blog posts. It meant I could seed content and guest posts as I was writing. I also spent a lot of time road testing book covers - most people don’t think about what their book cover will look like as a thumbnail, but with e-commerce representing a huge part of book sales for me, that was the most important”. In January 2020, Hype Yourself was published.
When Lucy started out, all of her clients were based in Hackney, so it was hugely important to her business and she met most of her clients through contacts in the local area. After six months she and Hadrien had achieved more of an international reach and had started working with people in Amsterdam and the US. She’s not wedded to the idea of staying in Hackney forever, however:
“Even pre-pandemic I had moved to more online work, so 2020 really solidified that we could actually live anywhere. The problem is, my infatuation with London is quite strong. And I recently found out my grandfather was born on Wick Road [in Hackney] and further back on the Werner side, someone owned a bakery on Chatsworth Road (now known as Millfields Café) so weirdly I’ve ended up, unknowingly, living where my family are from. I’m less than 50% British and together with Hadrien who is French, I enjoy living and working in a melting pot of cultures and creativity. That said, we do often dabble with the thought of upping sticks to France…. One day, who knows?”
Lucy has many dream projects, one of which is to upscale, so that The Wern is supporting thousands of small business owners in learning how to manage their own PR and marketing “…and smashing it. I daydream about hosting some kind of Hype Yourself publicity/personal brand/confidence/wellness-style retreat, in what would be, of course, my dream farmhouse in the South of France. And I would love to be writing comedy scripts (picture the scene of Colin Firth with his typewriter in Love Actually)”
Lucy is inspired by many businesswomen, both locally and further afield but cites good friends Kim Darragon (Kim Does Marketing), Rachel Boyett (Little Veggie Eats and another Clapton resident) and Becky Cope (founder of Litwick Candles) as the ones she admires the most.
Finally, Lucy has a top tip to share: “Great PR isn’t just national press coverage. Think about brand owners you know that own platforms aligned with you, and if they have a blog / Q&A section pitch to be featured. For added bonus points, flag others in your network that could work, too”.
Grab yourself a copy of Hype Yourself here and check out The Wern’s PR, coaching and marketing offering here.