Helping Blank Street feel right at home on Park Street.
Convincing Bristol's indie faithful that a global brand belonged on their high street.
Blank Street
When Blank Street Coffee announced plans to open its first Bristol site, they faced a challenge familiar to many national brands entering the city.
After spotting Blank Street's Bristol launch plans, Seb tracked down the right contact, made the introduction and before long we were helping shape the brand's arrival in the city.
Bristol is fiercely proud of its independent food and drink scene. Winning over local audiences requires more than simply opening the doors and hoping people turn up. The city needed to feel like Blank Street had arrived for Bristol, not just arrived in Bristol.
With a loyal following in London, a rapidly growing national footprint and a brand that was already generating significant buzz across social media, Blank Street had proven its concept worked. But success in Bristol would depend on building local relevance, creating excitement ahead of launch and positioning the brand as a welcome addition to the city's thriving coffee culture.
Our brief was simple: make Bristol fall in love with Blank Street before it even opened.
What they needed
What we did
Our approach focused on introducing Blank Street through the voices Bristol already trusted.
After identifying and securing the right mix of creators, we helped Blank Street to host an exclusive pre-launch matcha tasting event for a handpicked group of Bristol food and drink influencers.
The event was deliberately intimate, giving creators the opportunity to experience the brand, try Blank Street's growing matcha range and create content naturally, without scripts, sales messages or forced talking points.
From there, we delivered a 10-creator influencer campaign across Instagram and TikTok, focused primarily on micro and nano creators whose audiences closely matched Blank Street's target customer.
Rather than chasing the biggest follower counts, we prioritised creator fit, local relevance and authentic engagement. The creators we selected were already producing content around Bristol's coffee culture and had built genuine trust with their audiences.
We've always believed that relevance beats reach, and this campaign became a perfect example of why.
Becky O'Connor
Working with the Duchess team was a breeze, and their support and expertise meant we launched in Bristol confident our campaign was hitting the right mix of local tastemakers and influencers.
Blank Street
The campaign exceeded every benchmark set for it. Across 29 pieces of content, the campaign generated:
👑 210,000 views
👑 13,500 engagements
👑 74,900 combined creator reach
👑 6.43% engagement rate
For context, the average influencer engagement rate typically sits between 1% and 3%, meaning the campaign delivered more than double industry benchmarks.
Some of the strongest results came from the smallest creators involved. One creator with fewer than 2,000 followers generated more than 56,500 views and 3,275 engagements from a single piece of content.
Another delivered more than 56,000 views across Instagram and TikTok from an audience of just 3,812 followers.
The campaign reinforced something we see time and time again: audience relevance and creator credibility matter far more than follower count alone.
Through a carefully curated creator campaign and a local-first approach, we helped introduce a national brand to one of the UK's most independent-minded cities, generating awareness, conversation and excitement long before launch day.