Can you tell us a bit about you, your role and the business?

I have been a PR and writer for over almost thirty years, working in-house, agency and freelance. For many of those years, my role has been to promote products to the interiors press, with the ultimate aim of raising both press and consumer awareness of the brands I represent. I have worked as part of The Contemporary Home (TCH) team for well over a decade, helping the company to grow from its small beginnings to the much-loved online interiors brand it has become. We began working with Press Loft almost from the beginning of my time at TCH – the vibrancy and energy of the (then) small team at Press Loft really suited our own ethos and despite not being the only image library available, we immediately felt that the offering (and huge potential) of Press Loft was the perfect fit for our own brand.

What PR Activities do you do with Press Loft?

We currently have over 1,000 live images

We send on average 2 releases to press a month via Press Loft

We create collections within our images on Press Loft and direct press to particular selections of product in our other communication with them

We have a branded press room live on Press Loft

We send images directly to press within Press Loft

We receive journalist requests via Press Loft

We regularly download reports to enable us to better understand our press reach

We receive confirmed coverage emails from Press Loft

We have created a new collaboration post to reach bloggers

How is Press Loft helping your company?

Press Loft is one of the most valuable PR tools we have. By spending the time to regularly upload and update as many live images as possible, we are able to hugely increase the amount of press coverage we receive – and in a far wider base of publications than we would otherwise be likely to reach. In my opinion, quality and quantity are the key factors – a brand/company needs strong images (both lifestyle and cut out) of high quality, and lots of them, on Press Loft for its widest potential to be unlocked. And you need to change them as regularly as possible, keeping them topical both by seasons and themes.

I would estimate that having spent a great deal of time working on our image offering on Press Loft and tweaking it regularly, we now generate 60% of our coverage via the site.

What were you doing before you used Press Loft?

How we work hasn’t dramatically changed from before using Press Loft to now – we still issue trend/season/forecast releases directly to press on a regular basis; we still regularly contact individual journalists to update them and chat about what they’re working on; we still issue images ourselves directly to people who ask for them. But what Press Loft has done is expand our reach much further, much wider, and on a 24/7 basis. It’s like having double the people in the office! It also means that our press office is still open at the times when we’re all in bed….

Who would you recommend Press Loft to (if anyone?!)?

I would recommend Press Loft to anyone, to be honest! Small brands would hugely benefit (and quite quickly) from having a strong link with press (but they’d need decent photography and be willing to spend time on updating regularly), and much larger brands (who could quickly upload in quantity and quality) would immediately reap the reward of a jump in press coverage – and in places they may traditionally not have spent a great deal of time on.

Do you have a favourite piece of Press Coverage secured via Press Loft?

We are in the massively enviable position of having so many pieces of coverage generated via Press Loft that I find this question almost impossible to answer! However, it’s the newspaper coverage that pops up that I find particularly rewarding. Long ago, when I first started in PR, newspapers were king! These days it’s not quite the same, and they can often be very difficult to get hold of by email or phone, so it’s always exciting to see that they’ve downloaded something, and then get a notification from Press Loft (often only a few days later) that the image has made it onto the page. Quick, relevant, exciting coverage….what could be better?