The brief

The Inhaler Tailor makes decorative covers for asthma inhalers. The idea sounds simple, but the problem it solves is profound. Asthma kills over a thousand people in the UK every year, and Britain has one of the lowest inhaler compliance rates in the developed world. Many sufferers — particularly children — are reluctant to use their inhalers in public because of how they look.

Founder Will Hogge designed the first unicorn cover for Martha Bartle, a friend’s six-year-old daughter who’d had a serious asthma attack. It worked. Martha fell in love with her inhaler. Will and his wife Harriet built a business from it. When they came to Motive, they had a product that could genuinely change and save lives — and almost no one knew it existed.

The approach

This one called for pure journalism. Not a press release, not a product pitch — a story. We interviewed Will and Harriet, understood Martha’s story, and secured a quote from the NHS in York which was conducting a study on how inhaler covers improve compliance rates. Every element was there: a compelling founder, a child whose life had been changed, NHS validation, and a genuine public health issue.

We pitched to regional media first, landing a front page story in The York Press. Regional television followed — BBC Look North. Then we took it national. BBC Breakfast picked it up and ran the story.

The result

The BBC Breakfast feature triggered a 1,050% spike in sales — the kind of number that doesn’t come from advertising and can’t be manufactured. It comes from finding the right story and trusting the craft of journalism to tell it properly. The underlying sales increase of 27% confirmed that the PR hadn’t just created a moment — it had fundamentally shifted the brand’s commercial trajectory.