THE STORY SO FAR
I’ve been obsessed with stories since I was a child.
A torch under the duvet, long after I was meant to be asleep. A proper sulk once a book was finished, before the next one could start. A childhood spent both picking stories apart and devouring the good ones at the same time. Mesmerised by how just one word can spark feeling.
It’s a strange thing to build a career on, noticing what’s true about something and finding the exact words for it. Stranger still that it turned out to be useful. But most businesses have a version of that same unread book sitting inside them: something genuinely worth knowing, said badly, or not said at all.
Ibali grew out of the same instinct, pointed at businesses instead of novels. Companies that were quietly better than their own marketing let on, and never had the words to prove it. The instinct doesn’t stop at the words, either. It follows the thinking all the way through, into the campaign, the launch, the room where it finally happens.
There’s no line drawn between the strategy and the doing of it. One hand, start to finish, because something always gets lost in the handover otherwise.
Britain, and Scotland especially, is full of businesses that could stand beside the biggest names anywhere in the world, and still talk about themselves far too quietly. Closing that gap is most of the job.
The autopsies are the same instinct, let loose in public. A brand everyone already knows, taken apart to see exactly where the nerve failed. Not client work. Just proof of how the thinking runs when no one’s paying for it.
The client list stays small. Some things don’t scale, and this is one of them.
Speak soon,
Lucy x
NEARLY 20 YEARS NOW…
Though it never once felt like a straight line.
It started in London with internships. Moving in-house marketing for interior design studios, before re-positioning professional services brands. Beyond that various fashion houses, and for a while that meant Paris, inside the doors of Louis Vuitton, learning what it actually takes to make a name mean something to a stranger who’s never set foot in the building. From there the industries kept changing, but the question underneath them never did. Interior designers, treating a single room like an argument worth winning properly. Travel concierges, solving problems quietly enough that no one ever knew there’d been one. Hotels and restaurants, where an entire reputation can rest on one evening going right. Property. Professional services. Tech companies moving faster than the language built to describe them.
Different rooms, different stakes. A restaurant opening on a Tuesday, that no one else was watching. A London store opening, watched by everyone. An installation built for London Design Week, timed to land in the exact week the industry was already looking. A board that had never once been asked to explain itself in plain English, and didn’t much want to start.
What ran underneath all of it was never the sector. It was the same two things, wherever the work landed: talking to clients directly, without layers of account management in between, and finding the story that was already sitting there, true and mostly unsaid, waiting for someone to say it properly.
That’s still mostly the job.
THE WORK:
It starts with a conversation no one else hears, long before anything is written down. It ends somewhere far more physical, a page, a room, a hand closing around something real.
STRATEGY
The decision before the decision. What a business is actually for, and what it's finally ready to become.
POSITIONING
The line that holds when everything else changes, and the shape a business takes stepping into who it's already become.
ACTIVATIONS
A moment, not a mention. The kind that people remember without being told to.
AUDIENCE
New ground, or old ground, remembered properly. The people already paying attention, and the ones who weren’t.
CAMPAIGNS
Built to do one thing properly, rather than several things adequately. A start, a middle, and an end worth remembering.
LEADERSHIP
Embedded where the decisions are made, not consulted after them. A steady hand on the business as it changes shape.
And everything in between. The parts too specific to name here, and too important to leave out.
Start with an email. The rest follows: lucy@ibali.co.uk
‘I should have done this years ago.’
Emma Hughes
‘Lucy’s influence is nothing short of transformative.’
Jane Pikett