“Jill Kent is phenomenal at what she does. As a start-up brand with limited resource and awareness, we could never have hoped to get this kind of exposure without Jill and her expertise. I honestly have no idea how she does it, but I love it!”
Nick Croft-Simon, co-founder and Director, White Rabbit Pizza
Matteo Ferrari grew up making authentic Italian pizza at his family’s restaurant overlooking the Alps. As a boy, he would spend his days mastering the art of making mouth-watering toppings and perfect pizza dough at his Uncle’s pizzeria in Milan. Fast forward 10 years and it was whilst Teo was finishing up his studies and working part-time as a chef at a beer and pizza pub in Oxford that he met Nick Croft-Simon, who had recently graduated and was helping out behind the bar. They noticed that often one person in a group of diners couldn’t enjoy pizza because of an intolerance to gluten so Teo set about developing a gluten-free recipe for pizza.
It was in that moment White Rabbit was born, with the fledging foodie entrepreneurs soon going on to develop their own range of gluten-free vegan pizzas that don’t compromise on taste or quality and are available to the masses. Snapped up by the likes of Sainsbury’s, Ocado, Whole Foods and Waitrose, White Rabbit is now sold in more than 1,000 stores UK-wide, with a predicted turnover of £4.1M this year and their own state-of-the-art bakery in Oxford.
After a recommendation from another client, PR Superstar was tasked with raising White Rabbit’s profile outside of the specialist vegan and gluten-free press in the UK.
Trying to PR during the Covid pandemic was my toughest time professionally in almost three decades. Many journalists were furloughed. TV programmes were pulled off air. Regular columns and sections in newspapers and magazines were axed to focus all editorial on the coronavirus. Some media such as The London Evening Standard and City AM stopped publishing altogether and later, there were mass redundancies across the board as the UK media industry took a financial battering.
Never one to give up, PR Superstar remained open for business and I kept pushing for coverage for all my clients, including White Rabbit, by quickly pivoting and offering up Covid-related angles and stories to journalists. Face-to-face interviews with the press were simply out of the question so I arranged Zoom meetings and ‘old-school’ phone calls with Teo and Nick. To spread a bit of cheer in dark times, ‘care packages’ of delicious pizzas were delivered to journalists’ doors so they could try White Rabbit for themselves before writing articles.
PR highlights included interviews with Sky News and BBC News, as well as profile pieces on the pair in multiple national newspapers, from The Daily Mail to The Daily Telegraph. PR Superstar has been retained as the brand’s PR agency and is now very much part of the White Rabbit family.
