The brief

Messina Hembry is one of the UK’s leading online second-hand clothing retailers, built around premium quality sustainable fashion and the idea of giving pre-loved garments a second life. The founders had grown the business from a student side hustle into a multi-million pound company — a genuine success story with a genuine sustainability mission.

The challenge was one that many independent brands in the sustainability space face: the conversation is dominated by global retailers with enormous PR budgets, making it hard for smaller, more authentic brands to earn meaningful coverage. The brief was to cut through that noise and build a brand profile that reflected the quality and credibility of what Messina Hembry actually does.

The approach

Rather than positioning Messina Hembry as just another second-hand fashion retailer, we built a strategy that established the founders as genuine experts — voices that journalists could turn to for commentary on sustainable fashion, fast fashion debates, retail trends and consumer behaviour.

Over five months we delivered a multi-strand campaign. The founders’ journey — from student project to multi-million pound business — gave us a compelling business profile story for entrepreneurship and regional business press. Environmental impact data gave us credibility with sustainability publications. Reactive expert commentary on trending topics like fast fashion debates and changing consumer attitudes gave us an ongoing presence in national fashion and lifestyle media.

Product outreach to shopping round-ups and style features put Messina Hembry’s pieces in front of the right consumer audiences. Press releases on practical topics like tips for second-hand shopping reached the lifestyle press that their target customers actually read.

The result

Sixty-three items of coverage across national, lifestyle, fashion and sustainability titles — not through stunts or link-baiting, but through the sustained work of expert positioning and editorial relationship building. The brand domain rating grew from 29 to 34 during the campaign period, reflecting the broader authority being built across the web. More importantly, Messina Hembry now has a media presence that positions them as genuine leaders in sustainable fashion — not just another retailer with green credentials on their homepage.