We had a tissue meeting for the Italian booze brand I’ve been working on, which is fun. They always feel like crucial moments; I’m not sure you can win a pitch in them, but I’m absolutely certain that you can lose one. That risk calculus is not much fun. Thankfully this one went well, impressed the client, and gave us a pretty clear direction for the next steps.

I kicked off a new project within pet food, which is also shaping up to be interesting and which will start later this month. Strangely, I’ve worked on pet food more than most other categories, but this one will be the first time since having a dog of my own, which is an excuse to post a picture of the handsome boy himself:

The project has a strong in-store focus, so it’s a nice bonus to be pretty intimately familiar with various kinds of pet shop, and with the experience of going into one intending to buy one thing and coming out with £50 worth of dog toys that you definitely didn’t need.

I also started a pitch for a brand strategy project – this has been a week of beginnings, clearly – for one of my favourite Scotch whisky brands. Fingers crossed.

Work on Project M (the startup I’ve been working on) continues to rumble on. We’re all experiencing the chicken-and-egg situation that a side project has: we have to devote time to it in order for it to have some success, but it won’t be worth devoting time to until it’s had some success. We’re hoping that the antidote to that is to figure out a roadmap to as early a proof of concept as possible, not an MVP but rather a minimum viable validation of demand. We want to get as quickly and cheaply as possible to a point where there’s inarguably something worthwhile here – something worth sinking our savings and our time into.