Equitable Property Co. is a well-established commercial property company based out of Nashville, TN. As one of the first clients of Circa Design, when they wanted to rebrand and refresh everything from their logo to their messaging, they came back to the studio where it all started.
Equitable's rebrand, particularly its messaging and voice, was built out by the talented Craig Evans. From high-level, in-depth mission statements to two-sentence elevator pitches, the messaging was dialed in. As one of Senior Designers built out the website, my job was determine how the brokers biographies would be shared while still remaining true to the vision of the brand.
On top of figuring how to write the bios, I would need to figure what to write in the bios. Wrangling ten real estate brokers to gather personal details is no easy feat.
As usual, the first step was research—I created a collection of examples displaying narrative bios, bullet point bios, personal timelines, no bios, extremely condensed bios, too-much-information bios, and everything in between. In order to align with the feel of personable, sitting-on-a-leather-couch-drinking-whiskey, yet still remaining professional vibe, a few of those styles of biographies were immediately knocked out as contenders. Working alongside the Senior Designer, we decided how we wanted the bios to look on the site and concluded that a visually, a plain text, paragraph format fit best.
We knew we wanted each bio page to have something visually striking near the top, and for that something to be aspect that set them apart not just from each other, but from other biographies on other webpages. While trying to get the client to commit to having everyone pick a quote that could relate to business, he suggested they just pick their favorite quote—we let them run with it and it ended up adding the perfect amount of individuality and surprise to their structured and clean site.
As for the bios, we decided that they should be written from a first-person perspective, providing a sense of familiarity and closeness with the reader—as Equitable is all about building relationships. Equitable also prides itself on many of the brokers being from the Nashville area, so I needed to highlight that without being repetitive or stating it outright. Overall, the goal was to keep a tone that was prideful but not boastful, confident, but not presumptuous.
In order to actually write the bios, I started by the writing the bio of the President and letting each broker see that as an example. I then wrote each bio from a first-person perspective, to provide a sense of familiarity and closeness with the reader. I filled in the personal details as best I could with research from the internet, leaving large gaps in areas I couldn't fill or where I needed a quote. Below the draft, I left instructions and follow-up questions for each individual broker and once they responded, I was able to fill in the gaps and complete their biographies.
