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Richard Horwell is the owner and Managing Director of Brand Relations, a specialist food and drink marketing and branding company based in London. An entrepreneur who has been behind the launch and development of more than 100 brands in the UK, Richard also has more than 30 years global experience and has built up and sold many businesses within the food and drink sector.

There has been a massive surge of interest in the food and drink market since the Covid crisis hit. With so many people working from home, buying habits changed very quickly and quite dramatically.  Very early on I realised that we weren’t getting nearly as much interest as our competitors, so I decided we needed more media exposure.

The obvious solution was to bring in a PR company to help but to be honest I hadn’t had the greatest experience in the past of going down that route.

Although I have used hundreds of PR companies over the years that I have been in business, disappointment has been the overriding outcome. I have encountered some very low-level PR which left a bad taste. Sometimes you are too far down the road before you know if a particular PR company is good or bad and, of course, then it’s usually too late.

The last company we used charged a phenomenal amount of money and locked us into a six-month contract which we couldn’t get out of even though it clearly wasn’t working for us.  Over the course of that time, I think we had one article in The Metro and nothing else.

Panpathic couldn’t have been more different. Within the first three months we had over 30 articles in a variety of publications which I just think is amazing. Ok, so a couple of those articles were smaller than the others, but that’s fine. I didn’t mind that, at least we are now getting a wide exposure and we are getting our name out there and that’s good for building up our SEO too.

Working with Panpathic has totally changed my opinion of PR companies. Chantal and her team are the best ever and I am their biggest fan.

I think there is such a lot of mystic around PR when its not really complicated at all, it’s just work and if you do it properly you get results.

So many PRs pester the hell out of journalists and a lot of them just cut and paste press releases and send them out to everyone without any thought about what market they are aiming to reach. It’s just lazy. Food and drink in the UK is a tough market and you have to understand your target audience.

One of the best things Chantal has done is made me sit down and write about my company. Up until recently everything was in my head. That’s ok for me maybe but it has been so helpful for my business to get it all written down.

Now if I am talking to a potential client, I can direct them to go and read my PR and my blog for more information and it’s all there in black and white, things I might have forgotten to mention, or run out of time to mention during a phone conversation.

I think Chantal has a great work ethic, I speak to her regularly and I find the company very honest and true. In my opinion the service I get is great value for money.

What impressed me greatly was how Chantal totally embraced the whole Covid thing and was able to offer a first-class service from a rural farm in Wales throughout the lockdowns, without the need for some high-fluting offices in Shoreditch.

I think that showed as much as anything how she has got her priorities in the right order.

We are definitely getting more enquiries now, a lot of which are international.

I really enjoy working with Chantal and the team and hopefully will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Richard Horwell is the owner of Brand Relations, a specialist food and drink marketing and branding company based in London. Over the last 13 years, Brand Relations has been behind the launch and development of over 100 brands in the UK. Richard has also built up and sold companies of his own in the Food and Beverage sector. He has over 30 years’ experience in marketing FMCG brands around the world, having lived and worked in the UK, USA, Australia and the Middle East.

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