The Rev community probably won't be aware of this but this month we're running an advert for Sprezzatura in a "mostly small business" magazine here in the UK. We figure that small business owners are sufficiently independently minded that they'll be able to see the benefit of custom software over commercial off the shelf software that still needs heavy customisation but costs ten times as much.

The target market place is sophisticated so we don't want to hit them with reams of copy - rather we want to appeal to their innate good sense. You don't as a rule get to grow a small business by being stupid. So the advert we came up with is reproduced here :-


We thought (and fought) long and hard about it internally and were pleased with the end result. The advert was due to go to press on September 1st. Today (September 3rd) we received an email addressed to info@sprezzatura.com from a gentleman who wanted us to fit him in for an appointment to tailor a suit for him.

We were mortified. Adverts aren't cheap and to think that we might have so misjudged it that people thought we tailored bespoke suits?

A flurry of investigation followed and one of our smarter members noticed that the person asking for the tailoring might have a Canadian presence as their company was present there. A couple of clicks in a browser and the answer was apparent. There exists in Canada a bespoke tailors with a website of www.sprezzatura.ca. It has existed for quite some time BUT the first time in our existence we get a tailoring query is two days after our "bespoke" advert went to press....



Of course with hindsight if it went to press two days ago it is unlikely to be in the wild yet so the chances of the mail being in response to our advert is 0% but hindsight is always 20/20!

Labels: humour