Repositioning a Birmingham Brass-maker for a Global Luxury Audience

Some brands are built on craft long before they are built on words. Armac Martin has hand-finished solid brass cabinet hardware in Birmingham since 1929 — yet the way the business talked about itself had not kept pace with the luxury interiors market it now leads. They came to Nine Stones to sharpen their messaging, reposition the brand for a global audience, and produce content that could be found by the designers and specifiers who matter.

The Challenge

Founded in 1929 by brass founder Harold McGrail, Armac Martin is now a fourth-generation family business and an award-winning name in luxury interiors. Its portfolio of cabinet knobs, handles, T-bars and appliance pulls is cast, pressed, polished and finished by hand — a genuinely in-house operation that runs from its own foundry to its press shop and hot brass stampings. In spring 2022 the company was honoured with a Queen's Award for Enterprise for International Trade, and today a team of more than a hundred ships its collections worldwide.

The challenge was not the product — it was the language around it. The website undersold the craftsmanship, spoke more to trade buyers than to design-led specifiers, and lagged the brand's reputation in search. For a maker of genuinely luxury hardware, the words needed to carry as much weight as the work.

Finding the Words for the Craft

Before writing a single page, we needed to understand Armac Martin from the inside — its values, its audience, and what truly sets hand-finished British brass apart from mass-market hardware. Our brand workshop brought the team together to define that: the brand story, the people they most wanted to reach, and the points of difference that justify a premium.

That foundation gave us a clear tone of voice — confident and quietly luxurious — and a brief precise enough to write against.

Writing for Search Without Losing the Shine

With the positioning settled, we rewrote the website copy to do two jobs at once: speak to design-led buyers in language that felt considered rather than salesy, and earn visibility in search for the terms those buyers actually use. Modern SEO best practice guided the structure, but never at the expense of the brand's tone.

A Brand That Matches the Workmanship

The result is a website and a set of brand guidelines that finally reflect what Armac Martin makes — copy the sales team is proud to point prospects towards, built to support a growing international client base and the reputation that comes with nearly a century of craft.

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