Project
The Brotique
A men's grooming and lifestyle commerce brand with a strong editorial spine, run as a personal venture from brand to checkout.
- Client
- Personal venture
- Timeframe
- 2025
Shops first, website second
The Brotique started as bricks before it was clicks: a men's grooming retailer with shops on Edinburgh's Queen Street and St Stephen Street. Standing behind a counter teaches you things ecommerce dashboards never will, like what a man actually asks for ten days before a wedding, which gifts get bought in a panic, and how often the expensive thing is the wrong answer.
Today it runs as a personal venture in commerce and editorial: men's grooming sold with a point of view, reviewed honestly enough to stand on its own as reading. The retail years are the editorial advantage. The opinions come from having sold this stuff face to face and taken the returns when it disappointed.
Editorial with rules
The editorial side runs on a defined house style and review framework, written down and actually enforced:
- Verdict-first reviews, so the reader gets the answer before the story
- One clear winner per round-up, because a list of eight bests is a list of none
- A hard filter for what earns coverage at all: the definitive choice, something genuinely new, or something properly original
- Honest pros and cons, including the cons that cost affiliate clicks
- Disclosure rules that keep the commerce clean and visible
The framework exists because grooming content is mostly press releases wearing aftershave. The only durable position for a small publisher is being the one whose verdicts can be trusted, and trust is a system you build deliberately, the same as any other.
If a review isn't worth reading by someone who'll never buy, it isn't worth publishing.
The build
The site runs on Sanity, with content modelled as a system rather than a pile of pages. Reviews, round-ups, products and verdicts are structured types with real relationships, so a price change or an updated verdict propagates everywhere it should, and the house style has somewhere structural to live rather than surviving on memory.
It's the platform instinct at personal scale. The same discipline that governed twenty-plus products at Access governs one shop here, and the small version is where ideas get tested with no committee in the way. Several patterns I now recommend to advisory clients were proven on this site first, at a scale where being wrong costs an evening rather than a quarter.
Team and credits
This one's easy to credit, because the list is short.
- Built and run solo: strategy, identity, writing, content model, commerce and the shop itself
- The makers and suppliers whose products give the editorial something worth arguing about
- The customers from the Edinburgh shop years, who shaped the voice long before it had a content model
Where it goes next
The editorial spine keeps growing: more categories under the same review framework, with the house style doing the quality control and the content model doing the heavy lifting. Because the structure carries the standards, growth is mostly writing, which is the enjoyable part.
The Brotique is also the venture that keeps the craft sharp while the rest of the work stays strategic. Writing for real readers, shipping real pages and watching real behaviour is the best design practice I know, and this one happens to smell of cedarwood.