The Inhaler Tailor is one of those rare businesses that really does offer a solution to a very real problem. It's a business which deserves to succeed and the Motive team is very happy to have played a part in their success.

What Does The Inhaler Tailor offer?

The company produce funky covers for asthma inhalers, helping sufferers overcome their reticence when it comes to using the devices in public.

Asthma attacks kill more than a thousand people every year in the UK yet we have one of the lowest inhaler compliance rates in the developed world.

Founder Will Hogge, who suffered with childhood asthma himself, came up with the idea after a close friend's six year old daughter, Martha Bartle, suffered a serious asthma attack. He designed a unicorn themed case for Martha which helped her to fall in love with her device.

Will and wife Harriet now work full time on the business and are on a mission to help as many people as possible overcome their aversion to asthma inhalers.

The couple asked Motive to help them get the word out about The Inhaler Tailor.

Journalistic skills

We decided to profile them by sharing the story of how Will had helped Martha. The youngster's parents Jo and Nic were great sports and were happy to help us raise awareness by sharing their story.

We drew on our journalistic skills for this one. interviewing all the key players and securing a quote from the NHS in York which is doing a study looking into how the cases can improve compliance rates.

We then pitched to media, securing a front page story in The York Press and regional television coverage on BBC Look North. This was then followed by national TV coverage on BBC Breakfast and on several news websites including Yorkshire Live, Yahoo News and Teeside Live. Perhaps best of all the story made the BBC News website where it was one of the most popular stories of the day. We conservatively estimate opportunities to see the campaign at around 20m.

Traffic to The Inhaler Tailor website increased almost five fold during the campaign and daily sales peaked with an increase of more than 1050% following the BBC Breakfast coverage. At the end of the campaign daily sales remained 27% higher than they had been at the outset.

Harriet Hogge, from The Inhaler Tailor, said:

"Motive PR were a great agency to work with and they delivered exactly what we were after. They immediately understood the brief and from the start demonstrated fantastic journalistic expertise crafting our story into a piece that journalists wanted to cover. I also particularly loved their quality over quantity approach to the task.

Many agencies focus on wowing the client with the number of pieces of coverage they secure, but quantity doesn't necessarily equate to customer acquisition. Motive understood that we were after mass reach audio visual coverage, with a limited budget and they delivered that with the fantastic national BBC feature."

Motive MD Steve McComish said:

"This was a brilliant project to work on. Will and Harriet were great to work with and right from the very start we loved the products and the idea behind the business.

When we learned about the poor compliance rates in Britain for asthma medications we realised just how important the story was to tell well and to reach as many people with it as possible. I'm genuinely thrilled we managed to reach such a big audience with national TV coverage and we are grateful to Jo, Nic and (especially) Martha for their help with the campaign."

© MOTIVE