Urban Street Designs Gets An Urban Website Design

SNAPSHOT

The Problem: How do you sell ‘bespoke, high-end architectural metalwork’ to a market addicted to buying cheap, generic trash out of a catalogue?

The Fix: The ‘Anti-Catalog’ Positioning Strategy.

The Result: We turned a manufacturing plant into a ‘Design Partner’ that architects are practically drooling over.

ONCE UPON A TIME…

Meet ‘Urban Street Designs’ (USD).

Based in Nelson, Lancashire.

(For my American readers, that is a place in the UK where people speak with accents thicker than a bowl of oatmeal and work with steel harder than a diamond.)

These guys are the real deal. Established in 2016, but with over 100 years of combined engineering blood, sweat, and tears in the room.

They don’t just ‘make benches’.

They manufacture everything in-house. They partner with their sister company, MSM Fabrications (case story for those guys too on the next page.) They control the supply chain like a dictator controls the media.

But they had a massive, glaring problem: Their philosophy is ‘Bespoke as Standard’.

Meaning: They want to build cool, custom stuff.

But the rest of the world? The architects? The main contractors?

They are LAZY.

They just want to open a catalogue, point at ‘Generic Bin Model 4A’, and go to lunch.

USD was trying to sell a Ferrari service… to people looking for a Ford Focus.

HELP WAS AT HAND

So they came to us. And we didn’t just ‘rewrite their website’. We performed a strategic exorcism on their messaging.

We looked at their model. We looked at the competitors (who are all fighting a race to the bottom on price).

And we realized something: To a lazy contractor, ‘Bespoke’ sounds like ‘Expensive and Slow’. But to a visionary Architect whose ego is wrapped up in how the street looks?

‘Bespoke’ is a siren song.

So here is how we fixed it:

• The “Architect’s Ego” Angle: We stopped selling ‘metalwork’. We started selling ‘Legacy’. We positioned USD not as a manufacturer, but as a ‘Realization Partner’. We told architects: “You dream it. We handle the CAD, the headaches, and the welding. You take the credit.”

• The “No-Catalog” USP: We turned their biggest objection into their biggest weapon. We explicitly attacked the ‘catalog’ mentality. We positioned catalog-buyers as boring, safe, and uninspired.

• The “Supply Chain” Flex: To calm the nervous contractors worried about delays, we hammered the ‘In-House UK Manufacturing’ angle. No waiting for a shipment from overseas. It’s being welded in Lancashire, mate.

THE DAY WAS SAVED

The result? Chef’s kiss.

The messaging shifted from dry specs to ‘Architectural Porn’. By leveraging their ‘Bespoke as Standard’ philosophy, we made the ‘standard’ catalog options look cheap and nasty by comparison.

They finally had:

• A sales argument that stroked the Architect’s ego…

• While simultaneously reassuring the Contractor’s wallet.

AND THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER

Today, Urban Street Designs isn’t just a metal shop. They are the secret weapon for architects who want to win awards.

And as for us? We’re still here.

Taking boring industries… and turning them into gold.

Because that’s what we do.

And if you want us to do it for you, you know where to get in touch.