Making a headline from the Ts&Cs

Back in the day I had a brief to write an insert selling Hilditch & Key shirts to readers of The Times.

It was basically a half-price offer. So that could have been my headline. ‘50% off Hilditch & Key shirts.’ That would have worked. But, and this is where brands and how they sound comes in, would it have felt right? Both The Times and Hilditch & Key deserved better, I thought. You can always slap people about the chops with ‘Half-Price Bargain!’ and ‘Save £££s’ type headlines, but this wasn’t the occasion.

So I did some research about Hilditch & Key (a brand I hadn’t previously heard of) and learned that their shirts were popular with big names in the fashion industry. Yves Saint Laurent. Paloma Picasso. Karl Lagerfeld. In fact, I learnt that Lagerfeld was a proper little H&K fanboy, snapping up more than a hundred of their shirts every year. Weirdo. Anyway, I also read the terms and conditions attached to the offer. Don’t you do that? I thought all copywriters did that! No, I only did because of the Karl Lagerfeld thing. Lo and also behold, there it was: a term, or perhaps a condition, stipulating a maximum of two shirts per household. And with it, there was my headline.

Eye-catching, name-dropping, a bit cheeky, an air of exclusivity, and true to the brand values of both The Times and Hilditch & Key. Details of the offer went on the reverse.

Like I say, the insert might conceivably have sold more shirts if the headline had read ‘BUY NOW AND SAVE 50% ON CLASSIC SHIRTS!’, with a couple of flashes, all the copy in Courier, a call to action on every line and a bigger scissors graphic. But sometimes – hell, always – it’s about the brand.

Art Director: Tony Henry

Note: If you squint you might be able to detect a semicolon on the second line. Strictly illegal these days, a semicolon was sometimes used to indicate a pause shorter than a full stop and longer than a comma. What WAS I thinking.