Corporate PR to a Sunglasses Brand: What Transfers and What Doesn't
This is for founders who are about to write their "About" page for the tenth time and still hate it. The single most important decision is this: are you building a brand story framework around what you did, or around what the customer gets. Pick the customer, every time. I learned this the hard way moving from a $2.2B infrastructure project to a sunglasses brand doing $100K a year.
Decide this first
Everything in your brand story follows from one variable: who is the story for.
Corporate PR is written for stakeholders. Investors, regulators, the press, the board. The story has to protect the company as much as promote it. You write with lawyers in the room.
A sunglasses brand has no lawyers in the room. The story is written for one person scrolling Instagram at 9pm who has 4 seconds to decide if you're worth a second look. That person does not care about your mission statement. They care about whether the product solves something they feel right now.
Once you decide the story is for the buyer, not for your own ego or your own resume, the rest of the framework gets easy.
What to look for
A problem the customer already believes they have
At the infrastructure project, we spent months explaining a problem the public didn't know existed. That's normal in B2B and public affairs. You're often creating awareness from zero.
Consumer brands don't get that luxury. Nobody is waiting for you to explain why they need sunglasses. They already know. Your job is narrower: show them why yours fits a problem they already feel. Glare, headaches, looking cheap, lenses that scratch in a week. Pick the one you actually solve and say it in one line.
A founder detail that's specific, not impressive
Corporate bios are built to impress. Title, tenure, degrees. That's the wrong instinct for a founder story. Specific beats impressive. "I went through four pairs of sunglasses in one summer working construction and got tired of replacing them" does more work than "20 years of experience in eyewear." One is a fact. The other is a felt experience the reader can see themselves in.
When I scaled that DTC brand from $100K to $3M, the best performing ad copy wasn't about craftsmanship. It was one line about the founder breaking three pairs of cheap sunglasses on a fishing trip before building his own. Concrete beats credentialed.
A claim you can back with a number
This is the one piece of corporate PR that transfers completely. In big institutional communications, every claim gets fact checked before it goes out. That discipline is worth keeping. Consumer brands get sloppy here because nobody's checking. Don't be sloppy. If you say your lenses block 100% of UV, that needs to be true and testable. If you say "thousands of happy customers," pick the real number. 14,200 orders sounds more credible than "thousands" and it almost always converts better too, because specificity reads as honesty.
What to ignore
Ignore brand voice guidelines that run longer than two pages. At the infrastructure project we had a 40-page brand book. Needed, because dozens of vendors and agencies touched the material and had to stay consistent. A sunglasses brand with one founder and a part time designer doesn't need that. You need five rules you can hold in your head, not a binder nobody reads.
Ignore award-chasing language. "Award-winning" and "industry-leading" meant something when I was doing PR for a project with government oversight and trade press coverage. On a product page selling $89 sunglasses, those phrases are noise. Customers don't trust them and they don't convert. I pulled "award-winning" off one brand's homepage and saw no change in conversion rate over six weeks. It was dead weight the whole time.
Ignore the instinct to sound like a bigger company than you are. Corporate experience trains you to sound institutional, because institutional sounds trustworthy to boards and regulators. But a founder-led brand loses trust the moment it sounds like a committee wrote it. If your copy could have come from any sunglasses company, it's not doing its job.
Common mistakes
The biggest mistake founders coming from corporate backgrounds make is writing the brand story like a press release. Headline, boilerplate, quote from the founder in the third person. It reads credible and feels dead. Customers don't want a press release. They want to know why you built the thing and why it should matter to them specifically.
The second mistake is burying the actual story under qualifications. I've read "About" pages that open with three paragraphs of market context before mentioning the founder or the product. That's a corporate habit, setting the stage before the ask. On a brand site you have one scroll before someone bounces. Open with the person or the problem, not the context.
The third mistake, and the one I made myself early on, is treating the brand story as a one-time asset instead of a working part of the funnel. In corporate PR, you write the narrative once and it holds for years, maybe gets a refresh at a rebrand. In a DTC brand, your story needs to show up differently in an ad, on the product page, in a post-purchase email, and in a founder video. Same truth, different cut, depending on where the customer is. Treating it as static is why so many About pages get written once and never touched again while the rest of the site evolves around them.
FAQ
What's the most important part of a brand story framework for founders with no marketing background?
Specificity. Founders without marketing training default to vague language because vague feels safe. "High quality," "passion for the craft," "built to last." None of that differentiates you. Replace every vague phrase with a specific detail: a number, a place, a moment, a material. If you can't make a sentence specific, cut it.
How long should a founder story actually be?
Shorter than you think. On the DTC brand I ran, we tested a 400-word founder story against a 90-word version on the About page. The 90-word version had a 22% lower bounce rate and the same time-on-page. People don't need your whole history. They need the one moment that explains why the product exists and one line about what you're trying to do differently now.
Does corporate PR experience help or hurt when building a consumer brand story?
Both. It helps with discipline: fact-checking claims, thinking about how a story lands with different audiences, understanding that one narrative has to work across many channels. It hurts if you don't unlearn the instinct to write for institutions instead of individuals. The skill transfers. The voice has to change completely.
Should the brand story be on a separate page or woven through the whole site?
Both, but weighted differently than most founders think. The About page carries the full version for people who go looking for it, which is a small percentage of visitors. The real work happens in fragments: a line in the product description, a sentence in the email flow, a caption on a founder photo. Most customers get the brand story in pieces, not as one dedicated read.
The practical takeaway: write your brand story for the person buying, not the person you used to report to. Pick one real problem you solve, one specific and unflattering detail about why you started, and one number you can defend under questioning. That's the whole framework. Everything else is decoration.