The Wern is expanding

When I wrote my business plan for 2019, I had some very specific goals in mind. Particularly as I knew that I wanted to try and take some proper maternity leave this summer. Then life threw me a curve ball and I decided to play it to my advantage.

1.2019 GOALS

Just to give you a bit of insight, on the to-do list for this year was to take on as much project/consultancy work as possible pre-baby and focus on my own projects for my maternity leave (book, podcast, products, teaching and courses).

By the end of January, I’d already secured the book deal, which made it all a bit more real and put some firm timings in place. I had less than a year to build an audience who might want to buy my book or any of my other / offerings ideas. Luckily, as many of you know, Hadrien Chatelet my faux husband is a designer and he set about helping me with a brand refresh that I could role out across my website and social channels. 

2.    The products and toolkits

What came from partnering with Hadrien on this project sparked a million more ideas on how we could collaborate together. We started to concept the idea of making products and really beautiful toolkits to be something tangible that helped small business owners, freelancers and side hustlers that could go with the book. Only problem was, he as already spending a lot of time just assisting me with the day-to-day and a very intense full time job…

3. The redundancy phone call

Literally, a week after I secured the book deal and dreamt up all these ideas of how I wanted to move to make The Wern more of a “brand to help brands” I got a phone call from Hadrien. “I’ve been made redundant” he said and I just laughed. We had always joked up about working together and now the universe had thrown us an opportunity to try it. I stepped up my hours to five days a week to try and save up as much money for my maternity leave as possible and Hadrien took over the child-care whilst we waited for his gardening leave to finish.

4. Fast forward to today

As a side effect of me reframing my own brand, I’ve had lots of inbound requests from people who want to do the same for their business. I’ve also had increased demand for one-to-one coaching sessions from entrepreneurs who want to learn DIY PR for themselves. BUT I’ve also had unprecedented demand for the same to help with branding and design.

SO, without further ado, I would like to formally announce that as of today, Hadrien Chatelet is Creative Director of The Wern, responsible for heading up our branding / design arm. The creative division will use his bigger agency thinking in a more meaningful way, by providing affordable branding & design consultancy, coaching and products. 

Contact him on Hadrien@thewern.com

5. Oh and here is something we made earlier…

We are currently soft-launching our first ever product. Designed by Hadrien and written by myself, you can now pre-order ‘52 PR Tips’ for £15 plus p&p. The slickly designed package includes 52 cards, with one publicity idea a week to help jumpstart your press office. We are just testing out a small run to see how we do, so get in their quick, first batch will be ready for despatch in June.

Cheers

Wern x

P.S. When I needed to make all my social media handles the same. I didn't just become Wernchat because I’m chatty, it’s also the front half of Chatelet combined with my name