Bringing a stealth company on the record

This manufacturer builds solar power for spacecraft, and it moves at the speed of the industry it serves. We have been its partner since it came out of stealth, when its leadership brought us in to help the company come out of stealth, and we shaped the first words it said in public.

This year the partnership became our deepest yet with the company. With a sales and marketing leader now in place to own the relationship, it needed more than words: a site that looks and sounds like the company it has become, a steady public voice, and a way to keep every claim accurate while its product line keeps moving.

We started from the story and worked outward. Everything the company says in public, from the site to press to social to product datasheets, draws on one set of messages and one set of facts, so the company sounds like itself wherever someone meets it.

For a company whose products change faster than any single document can keep up with, the facts needed as much care as the words. So every figure, name and claim we use carries a state that says how settled it is: settled, verify before use, contested, or never for publication. The state travels with the work, so a number checked one month isn't quietly trusted two months later.

The company asked us to lead its new site to life. We stewarded everything around the build: the content, the decisions, the coordination and a tracker of more than a hundred items.

Around it, we built the storytelling a fast-moving manufacturer needs. Social launched, and the datasheets were redesigned to carry the same expression as the site. We also prepared and launched the company's first real outbound PR and media relations effort, with targets matched to the nature of the business, from top-tier aerospace publications to scientific trade magazines. The first round of pitches drew on independent test results on the company's modules, and those results caught the interest of an industry publication, which ran a feature.

When the research institute's results went out as a release, the company asked for it to lead with its own voice. We moved two paragraphs to put it first and changed none of the institute's words. The research stayed the institute's, which is what made it worth publishing.

The company is out of stealth and on the record: a site that reflects the company it has become, a public voice that holds across every surface, and test results in an independent institute's own words. None of it is finished, by design. As the company scales, the partnership keeps widening with it, and the facts underneath stay current, so every surface keeps pace with the company's growth and its sales and marketing leader can keep his attention where it belongs.

We'd keep a record of how settled each fact is, attached to the work rather than to someone's memory, for any company whose products move this fast. And we'd keep a light hand on third-party proof. The evidence stays theirs, and that is what makes it worth publishing.

We'd also keep reading a partnership by who owns it on the client's side. The work deepened when the company had someone whose job it was to carry it.