Plunge and dollop
Now there’s a headline you don’t see every day
Plunge are, 'prop and costume designers to the stars. Creators of the phantasmagorical for film, TV and wherever else you want to amaze and astound.'
You know those crazy Masked Singer costumes? Well, Plunge make them. That 30-foot fantasy Christmas tree at St Pancras? That was Plunge too. Prince Harry’s head for Spitting Image? Guess who.
These guys are ‘pin amazing. They’ve worked with BAFTA, the BBC, Disney, DreamWorks, LEGOLAND®, Netflix, Red Bull, the Science Museum… mind-boggling creations for a mind-boggling client list.
So, when we were asked if we fancied having a crack at their tone of voice, we nearly had an accident worthy of a toddler on their tenth tumbler of Tizer.
Taking the plunge
Some days the phone rings and you’re so glad you were in. We’d been recommended by an anonymous Copywriter, who knew a bloke, who had a mate at another design agency, who were working on the Plunge website.
They had a brief. We had a gap. The stars aligned.
It was the bare bones of a copy brief. Enough to get us twitching with excitement, but nowhere near enough to know what the client needed. So, we zoomed and nattered. There was a bunch of brand development stuff, and initial website designs to play with, but we needed more.
Aladdin’s cave on steroids
If you’re going to define someone’s brand voice, you need to look ‘em in the eyes. Ferret around in their knicker drawer. Ask some dumb questions.
Tickets, passport, toothbrush. We jumped on the 49 bus and, as if by magic, we were there – somewhere between Neverland, Whoville, and the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Everyone was involved. Plungers, dollopers, Chris from the design agency, and a gaggle of ghouls, goblins and gremlins. Imagine you’d guzzled some magic mushroom tea, been dropped into a hall of mirrors and then someone started playing Willy Wonka music – backwards. It was like that, but weirder.
Horror heads, aliens, googly eyeballs, giant caterpillars… were we seeing things? No, we were on a guided tour of the Plunge workshops, before getting down to business.
A brand workshop within a workshop
We’d sent a pre-workshop questionnaire, but the answers weren’t getting our goose bumps going. It was all a bit serious, safe and samey.
When we dug deeper, we found that Plunge wanted a great big fun injection up their brand voice’s bum. At that point, their brand voice was tired and boring. The exact opposite of everything they were really about. It was time to be more… more… well, more everything.
We pushed them to be more Plunge-y in the workshop, and they happily dived in. And together we landed on ‘adventurous, spontaneous, joyful and a little bit out there’ as the ballpark voice to aim for.
“Let’s go for it, let’s do something a bit brave and bonkers.” Everyone’s goose bumps were now standing to attention.
We left buzzing with ideas. Gagging to knock their tone of voice into a much more weird and wonderful shape.
Giving Plunge its brand voice
There were so many directions this could go, so we had to nail it down before it got over-excited and threw up on the back of the bus. First step, putting together a tight tone of voice guide, with stuff like this packed into it:
Three characteristics that underpin our voice
Playful
We’re designers, artists, craftspeople and dream-makers. Play is pretty much what we do every day. Our workshop and our minds are our playgrounds. Everything starts with the joy of creating something incredible out of thin air. We make sure to splash this playful attitude across the screen and page in big, bright, bold and bouncy language.
Fearless
When was the last time we said, “no, sorry it can’t be done”? How about, err… never. The bigger, the bolder and the more impossible the brief, the better. That’s what we’re here for – to ‘Create Wonder’ and ‘Make the Extraordinary’. And along with that mission, comes an extraordinary can-do energy that we channel into our words.
Professional
It’s true, we do romp around in a big playground of possibility all day long, but boy are we serious about our work. We throw ourselves into everything 100% and that includes the way we manage the project and deal with our clients. We never miss a deadline. We never let anyone down. We never deliver anything less than incredible. And you can bet we’ll find a fun way of getting this across in our copy. Persuasive, not corporate. Believable, not boring.
And we also gave them a taste of how their new voice would look like in the real world. A bit of before and after jiggery-pokery to get their buy-in:
Before:What we do
We work in a wide variety of materials. These range from timber, plastics and metals to fibreglass, polystyrene and even food. In fact, there are very few materials we don’t have experience working with in our fabrication processes.
We have the facilities to take most projects from start to finish in-house. Our large workshop capacity means we can create props and build sets to almost any scale.
After:What do we do?
Ha! What don’t we do?
We make dreams come true. We create magic out of thin air. We turn unbelievable ideas into reality.
And we do all of this with giant chickpea testacles, jelly palaces, dinosaurs made out of crumpets, talking toilets and bespoke tweed suits for race horses.
No idea too big, bold or brave. Any material, from chocolate to fiberglass. And all of it brought to life in our workshop of the weird and wonderful.
If you can imagine it, we can build it. If you can’t, our designers will imagine it for you. We’re here to create wonder and we can’t wait to create it for you.
They loved it. We loved it (although admittedly, they did ask us to turn it down from 11 to 9 in a few places).
So after a little bit of a tweak, it was game on. Website copy crafting time – so much fun, it should probably be illegal.
Here’s a snippet that we’re still giggling about 6 months later, but if you want the full Plunge, there’s a link at the end.
Yeah, but can you…
Let us stop you there. Yes, we can. We can design it, sculpt it, mould it, 3D print it; in any medium, at any scale, all in-house. If you can wear it, wiggle it or stick your hand up it, we can do it.
Like what you see?
If you want to have a proper nosy, here’s their website in the wild. And if you need help with bringing your brand to life, gizzatinkle. We’d love to help.
