Inspired by the Cotswolds: A Home Interiors Company that Blogs with Style

Inspired by its roots in the Cotswolds of England, The Cotswold Company brings stylish, cozy, and laid-back home interiors to life. Here, The Cotswold Company team shares how their blog echoes their design aesthetic, acts as a lifestyle portal for their customers, and unifies their brand across social networks.

What story do you try to tell on your blog?

We make timeless, rural classics for people whose hearts are in the country. Our furniture is designed to slip into a lived-in home, playing a starring role in life’s everyday stories. We’re all about elevating individuality, retelling those family anecdotes and celebrating the beautiful imperfections you’ll find inside a real home.

Everything we make and do is inspired by the Cotswolds. When we make decisions, we check that they sit right — that our furniture wouldn’t look out of place there, and that locals would feel proud to own it! Because without the Cotswolds, we’d just be a regular interiors company.

Your blog, which uses the Mellow theme, complements your website beautifully. How does this design fit your needs?

Learn how to display Portfolio projects on your own site.

We primarily use the Portfolio function of Mellow. We love the tiled landing page it generates when you use the featured image option. The page gives our customers an overview of who we are visually, which has become a really useful tool for us. We can send people here knowing they will get an understanding of who we are and the things we love.

Project Types are a way to categorize your Portfolio projects.

We use the same white border on all of our featured images, allowing some clear space around each picture. This look ties to the photography on our main website. We also enjoy the Project Types feature, which offers a menu at the top and enables customers to select the kind of topics they’re interested in.

How do you use the blog to inspire and engage your customers?

For example, you’ll find stories about home from the design team and seasonal inspiration linking to Christmas products in their store.

Our blog gives us the space to introduce our customers to broader content, to showcase our lifestyle photography, and also gives a more in-depth overview of new products. It’s very difficult to communicate this sort of thing via email and social platforms because your word count is limited and your message has to be snappy. We’ve found that by linking to posts from email or our social platforms, we can allow our customers to get to know us better on their own time.

From Facebook to Twitter and Instagram to Pinterest, The Cotswold Company has a consistent, well-curated social presence. What place does the blog have among these platforms?

The site also allows them to provide more details for giveaways and create narratives around their products.

The blog is a place where we can indulge a little. We can show our customers even more detail, focus on the photography, and avoid some of the practical restraints we have to adhere to on our website. It’s a place where we can show customers a little more of our personality as a brand, so we try to use it as much as possible.

We tend to invest a lot of time and energy making the posts beautiful and useful. When they’re created, excerpts from each post can then be cascaded down throughout email and our social platforms. This often complements products we’re showcasing and allows our customers to access the information from the post easily.

The blog is a place where we can indulge a little.

There are numerous options for blogging and publishing. Why did you go with WordPress.com?

The WordPress.com platform is incredibly intuitive to use. Many on our team have used it in the past or use it for personal blogs outside of work. Having such a user-friendly platform has helped us avoid the bottleneck of relying on internal IT support. Anyone in the marketing team can log in and create a post, which is a wonderful tool to have at your disposal.