We’ve come a long way, but we’re not too sure where we’ve been. We’ve had success. We’ve had good times. But remember this. Glasgow is a very long way to drive there and back for the day from Birmingham. It’s way easier to stay over and in the interests of the project you are working on, go for three curries in three different places.
It started with a phone call. Could I write a bio for a ketchup brand? In my style, like I write the blogs? Decent money in it for me, which, given I’d just taken voluntary redundancy, was always nice. I met Chris in the pub, asked him some questions, dug a bit deeper into the bits that I found interesting and wrote 250 words of copy for the website. And that’s it. That’s how I ended-up in the Office of Omar.
Two and a bit years of being paid to write (mostly) about the thing I love and know best. The incarnation of Barney – a potential sleeping giant if there ever were one – and long lunches confirming what we ultimately knew to be the fifty best restaurants in Birmingham. Bringing Jon in to do Cardiff and Meg for Bristol. Team lunches in Cardiff with huge cuts of beef that force the glasses of Rioja out to the peripherals of the table. Drinks. A second dinner. More drinks and a fuzzy train home. An expansion to Manchester with a big lunch in Purnells to celebrate. Learning that there are few better places to digest the work than over food and a glass of wine, even if Glynn Purnell has accidentally dropped some frozen ice into your Chablis. A realisation that the time away from the laptop is every bit as important as the words typed into it.
There’s a joy to work that only happens if you do it well. Take The Plough and their idea for a toasted sandwich brand. Three hour meeting with two of them and three of us for Deathrow Sandwich to be born, developed in front of me by Omar and Steve taking the principles and building the brand. The success of that leads to them asking about a pizza brand to run alongside it, followed by the deep dive into pizza and the realisation that the biggest sellers on the more commercial pizzas happen to be creating their own. The birth of Deathrow Pizza. It should be a hard sell to tell anyone that the creations of a chef should be put aside to let the customers choose what they want, but it’s not. I like to think it’s the result of working with great people on either side of the coin. Trips to Glasgow off the back of a £100 mailer campaign to eat curry in the name of Namaste and biriyani for Bonnie Bambuli. I’d make that trip to Scotland every week to work with people so open to challenging the norms and building something so distinct. What we do is supposed to break convention, because conventional is often so predictable and so boring for the people who use it.
We challenged it because that is how we work. We *could* just design a cool logo, in the same way we *could* just come up with a cool name, or design a website that both looks great and functions. Lots of other people could probably do that as well. But the dynamic between the three of us means that every part of the project is built from the ground up, heavily researched, analysed, and discussed. Like when Omar came to us with “Bonnie Jalebi” and I opposed it heavily because it was a biriyani brand and not an Indian sweet shop. We went and had lunch at the Indian brewery, heard his reasoning, went back and came up with Bonnie Bambuli so that the ethos remained the same. Getting it right is more important than getting it done within the billed hours.
Omar’s a fucking joy to work with and I’m not just saying that because this sits on a section of his website. Do you know how refreshing it is to sit opposite someone and just spitball ideas back and forth without fear of getting it wrong? Who else is going to suggest that I write a poem for a two Michelin chef’s new casual concept? It’s what we did. And we set it to the backdrop of Indian hiphop. I sat in on a meeting with him last week where someone described him as “a genius”. Whilst I’m not going to go that far, I’ll say that he has changed the way I look at doing work. No SEO word salad, No 2000 words if 200 (or even 20) will do the job. Just clean, punchy work that never deviates from its intended purpose.
I am Simon Carlo, a food blogger, journalist, copywriter and bonafide mild child. The above words are mine. Mostly. The gooder ones anyway.
