Crafty Alchemy Shop

Friday 15 September 2017

Book Review - Style Your Brand - Fiona Humberstone


Branding for your small business, I don't know about you, but I feel that brilliant branding is sometimes a bit like the Holy Grail of small businesses, a little bit difficult to find or achieve, more so maybe if it's just you doing the work and, like me, you're certainly no expert. If you can afford to hire someone to create the perfect brand for your business, that's great, even better, if you've trained, studied or worked in marketing, branding or design and you can create exactly what you would like yourself.

After nearly 5 years of tweaking and changing, growing and changing again, another couple of tweaks here and there of the Crafty Alchemy brand I'm pretty happy with my branding, but I know it could be better so now that my small business is growing and changing a little bit again I want to step it up a bit, polish it up and refine my brand image and message.

After looking through reviews of books on branding I ordered Fiona Humberstone's How to Style Your Brand. As soon as the book arrived I fell in love with the beautiful imagery inside, gorgeous photography which inspired a lot of brand envy - but in a good way, more of a 'Wow! I'd love my branding to look that good' sort of way.


From the outset Fiona explains that your branding is so much more than a pretty logo and a snappy, clever and memorable tagline, it's the whole package, from your photography to the way you write every blog post or how you package your products to your latest Twitter update, it's every single element of your business. It sounds a little overwhelming but I promise you it isn't. 

After reading through, answering all the questions and doing all of the tasks, I was really very pleased to discover exactly how much I'd learned, not only about how Crafty Alchemy should look and sound, but what Crafty Alchemy actually is and does. I also learned where the holes are and so many other things that could and should be done, including ideas for new products that I hadn't thought of. Sometimes I found myself thinking that this lady understood my business better than I did.

All of the information and exercises in the book are really thorough yet not at all complicated and found that I became completely inspired by what else Crafty Alchemy could do, I had some serious light bulb moments whilst working on this. At no point did I feel that it was beyond my skill set or that it was too difficult for me to make the changes to get the ideas out of my head and into the real world.

The Colour Psychology section was a revelation! Explaining all about colour psychology and seasonal personalities, again in a very uncomplicated, easy to understand manner. This part of the book also gave me a confidence boost, because as I was reading through I realised that I had actually totally nailed my colour choices all by myself two years ago when I last altered my branding. 

I'm now refreshing my branding and brand message with everything I've learned over the last couple of weeks and feel confident enough to adjust my branding package again as needed in the future. This is definitely one of those books that you can go back to again and again whenever you need to give yourself a quick refresher.

There is also a new book by Fiona Humberstone, Brand Brilliance, which I'm currently reading and working my way through, I'll let you know how I got on once I've finished it.

You can purchase Style Your Brand by Fiona Humberstone here on Amazon
Fiona's website -  The Brand Stylist
The Brand Stylist's gorgeous Instagram feed: @thebrand_stylist


*Please note - I received no payment or compensation for reviewing this book and I am not affiliated in any way with Fiona Humberstone or The Brand Stylist, I bought it because it looked like what I was looking for and I'm sharing it because I  think it's really very good indeed. Thank you.


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Thanks so much for taking the time to leave a comment. I do read each & every one of them.

Claire xx


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