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Just a few years ago, product descriptions were in a bad place. They were every marketing plan’s least desirable deliverable, more of an admin task than a creative opportunity, churned out en masse and recorded in sad spreadsheets, most likely by an unlucky junior or a disinterested freelancer, perhaps even a robot.
But then something cool started to happen. Palace (who else?) changed the game with some typically off-beat thinking: Maybe the product description doesn’t need to say anything at all about the product?
The skate/streetwear label’s absurd stream-of-consciousness bullet point format (supposedly still written by co-founder Lev Tanju) — really a kind of anti-product description — is now a cornerstone of the brand’s irreverent identity. These product descriptions are so cool, they’ve got their own coffee table book.
Suddenly, all kinds of brands are doing interesting stuff with their voices, not just on their home pages and socials but in the nitty-gritty, business-end bits of their websites. This is an exciting thing, and a copywriter’s dream. The best product descriptions educate and entertain in equal measure, bringing a sense of fun and creative freedom that most brands would have once reserved for billboard campaign and TV spots. Let’s enjoy a few recent highlights of this copy-based revolution.
On
Swiss running shoe brand On are all about tech innovation. The genius of their product pages lies in the way they take a typical description and dial it all the way up. They’re still using the “this product is made of this special material, so you can do this…” format loved by sports and outdoor brands, but there’s more of EVERYTHING. More key features, more images, more diagrams, more cool-sounding words with little symbols after them like Speedboard® and Helion™.
The writing combines scientific precision with a kind of super-powered positivity to leave you wondering why you ever considered buying another running brand. Take this from the Cloudmonster 2 (great name btw) product page:
I have no idea what CloudTec is, but do I want to find out? More importantly, do I want these on my feet next time I coax myself into running 10k? Definitely. Just take my money, On.
Vollebak
Vollebak is the brand inventing clothes you might wear to survive the apocalypse or hang out on Mars. Unsurprisingly, they’ve got a lot to say about these futuristic-ass products and, much like On, they fully commit to educating the reader into purchasing. Vollebak don’t really do product pages at all, more like in-depth magazine profiles of their experimental creations.
The Full Metal Jacket - Copper Edition page explains — at great length — why copper is one of the most advanced materials in the solar system. The Firefly Jacket page tells us that “possums, sharks, frogs and flying squirrels have been flexing biofluorescent fur and skin for millions of years”. Cool. Products in the Indestructible range introduce Dyneema, a material so strong it can be found in tanks, bulletproof cockpit doors and is now “also being used in artificial limbs.” There are nice touches of humour too, like this simple line for the Apocalypse Jacket: “Zombies will hate it.”
Paired with beautiful imagery and columns of impressive-sounding technical details, it all adds up to an eye-opening, mind-expanding, fairly bonkers experience. This website is a rabbit hole of fireproof hoodies and solar-charged jackets that glow in the dark. At every turn, the writing really sells the Vollebak mission. Suddenly, £1,195 for a Full Metal Jacket starts to seem like a bargain.
Dowsing & Reynolds
The strangely sensuous product copy of online interiors brand Dowsing & Reynolds recently caught the attention of TOV guru Nick Parker. His deep-dive into these descriptions is well worth a read, because they are quite simply a thing of wonder.
D&R’s approach involves treating each of their products (wall hooks, cupboard handles, even a toilet roll holder) as the jump-off point for deep reveries of domestic bliss, written in an unusual second-person perspective and often flirting with the tone of bad erotic fiction. These are the most descriptive of product descriptions, completely overwritten yet still somehow perfect. Someone’s definitely having a lot of fun creating them.
Here’s a personal favourite, the Gold Skyscraper t-bar handle:
And there’s more, MUCH more, where that came from. I like to imagine these product descriptions being used IRL as well. If D&R had a physical store, would a sales assistant appear to deliver a breathless monologue as you were browsing the lamp shades? Would that be great retail theatre, or just really creepy? Maybe both? One for the brand to consider going forward.
Black Lines
London-based purveyors of bottled cocktails, Black Lines, are serving some lovely product copy over on their website. Their product descriptions carry a sophisticated voice with a dash of humour and a sense of playful restraint. Each one seems finely tuned to give the non-committal scroller a perfect little nudge to buy.
Their Negroni is “the Judi Dench of the cocktail world: short, strong, a timeless classic”, while the Paloma is introduced as “Margarita’s better looking sister”. Nice. But it’s not all just pithy lines - you’ll learn something too, with nuggets of drinks trivia deftly added to the mix. Who knew that “punch”, as in rum punch, comes from the Sanskrit word for five, meaning five traditional ingredients? You’ll leave Black Lines enlightened and with lighter pockets.
Roundup: Horosoaps, Houseplant, Old Spice
There are so many brilliantly written product descriptions out there these days, this could go on forever. But nobody wants that. Let’s quickly breeze through a few more choice selections.
Horosoaps
Of all the brands flexing a Gen Z-style voice online, Horosoaps takes some beating. You have to love any brand brave enough to ridicule you into buying, and that’s exactly what these product descriptions for zodiac-themed soap bars do. Grow up, Pisces.
Houseplant
Seth Rogen may get stoned a lot, but he hasn’t forgotten about a single page of the Houseplant website. It’s great when you can clearly hear a famous founder’s voice coming through in every piece of copy. The deadpan product descriptions for Rogen’s weed lifestyle brand are a delight: the Standing Ashtray is simply “the ashtray that stands so you can sit”, the Ridge Ashtray was “inspired by a marvel of modern engineering: the potato chip”, and the Housecoat and Sleep Mask is “for people who take relaxation very seriously”.
Old Spice
Finally, it’s not just cool new brands who are doing cool product descriptions. Check out the Old Spice website, where the brand continues to build on the hilarious promise of their now-legendary ad campaigns. Who wouldn’t want a deodorant that “transforms unfresh men into legends of confidence”?
Long may the golden age of product descriptions continue.
Matt Duxbury is a London-based freelance senior copywriter and creative. You can learn more about him here, or on LinkedIn.
Add to basket
Just a few years ago, product descriptions were in a bad place. They were every marketing plan’s least desirable deliverable, more of an admin task than a creative opportunity, churned out en masse and recorded in sad spreadsheets, most likely by an unlucky junior or a disinterested freelancer, perhaps even a robot.
But then something cool started to happen. Palace (who else?) changed the game with some typically off-beat thinking: Maybe the product description doesn’t need to say anything at all about the product?
The skate/streetwear label’s absurd stream-of-consciousness bullet point format (supposedly still written by co-founder Lev Tanju) — really a kind of anti-product description — is now a cornerstone of the brand’s irreverent identity. These product descriptions are so cool, they’ve got their own coffee table book.
Suddenly, all kinds of brands are doing interesting stuff with their voices, not just on their home pages and socials but in the nitty-gritty, business-end bits of their websites. This is an exciting thing, and a copywriter’s dream. The best product descriptions educate and entertain in equal measure, bringing a sense of fun and creative freedom that most brands would have once reserved for billboard campaign and TV spots. Let’s enjoy a few recent highlights of this copy-based revolution.
On
Swiss running shoe brand On are all about tech innovation. The genius of their product pages lies in the way they take a typical description and dial it all the way up. They’re still using the “this product is made of this special material, so you can do this…” format loved by sports and outdoor brands, but there’s more of EVERYTHING. More key features, more images, more diagrams, more cool-sounding words with little symbols after them like Speedboard® and Helion™.
The writing combines scientific precision with a kind of super-powered positivity to leave you wondering why you ever considered buying another running brand. Take this from the Cloudmonster 2 (great name btw) product page:
I have no idea what CloudTec is, but do I want to find out? More importantly, do I want these on my feet next time I coax myself into running 10k? Definitely. Just take my money, On.
Vollebak
Vollebak is the brand inventing clothes you might wear to survive the apocalypse or hang out on Mars. Unsurprisingly, they’ve got a lot to say about these futuristic-ass products and, much like On, they fully commit to educating the reader into purchasing. Vollebak don’t really do product pages at all, more like in-depth magazine profiles of their experimental creations.
The Full Metal Jacket - Copper Edition page explains — at great length — why copper is one of the most advanced materials in the solar system. The Firefly Jacket page tells us that “possums, sharks, frogs and flying squirrels have been flexing biofluorescent fur and skin for millions of years”. Cool. Products in the Indestructible range introduce Dyneema, a material so strong it can be found in tanks, bulletproof cockpit doors and is now “also being used in artificial limbs.” There are nice touches of humour too, like this simple line for the Apocalypse Jacket: “Zombies will hate it.”
Paired with beautiful imagery and columns of impressive-sounding technical details, it all adds up to an eye-opening, mind-expanding, fairly bonkers experience. This website is a rabbit hole of fireproof hoodies and solar-charged jackets that glow in the dark. At every turn, the writing really sells the Vollebak mission. Suddenly, £1,195 for a Full Metal Jacket starts to seem like a bargain.
Dowsing & Reynolds
The strangely sensuous product copy of online interiors brand Dowsing & Reynolds recently caught the attention of TOV guru Nick Parker. His deep-dive into these descriptions is well worth a read, because they are quite simply a thing of wonder.
D&R’s approach involves treating each of their products (wall hooks, cupboard handles, even a toilet roll holder) as the jump-off point for deep reveries of domestic bliss, written in an unusual second-person perspective and often flirting with the tone of bad erotic fiction. These are the most descriptive of product descriptions, completely overwritten yet still somehow perfect. Someone’s definitely having a lot of fun creating them.
Here’s a personal favourite, the Gold Skyscraper t-bar handle:
And there’s more, MUCH more, where that came from. I like to imagine these product descriptions being used IRL as well. If D&R had a physical store, would a sales assistant appear to deliver a breathless monologue as you were browsing the lamp shades? Would that be great retail theatre, or just really creepy? Maybe both? One for the brand to consider going forward.
Black Lines
London-based purveyors of bottled cocktails, Black Lines, are serving some lovely product copy over on their website. Their product descriptions carry a sophisticated voice with a dash of humour and a sense of playful restraint. Each one seems finely tuned to give the non-committal scroller a perfect little nudge to buy.
Their Negroni is “the Judi Dench of the cocktail world: short, strong, a timeless classic”, while the Paloma is introduced as “Margarita’s better looking sister”. Nice. But it’s not all just pithy lines - you’ll learn something too, with nuggets of drinks trivia deftly added to the mix. Who knew that “punch”, as in rum punch, comes from the Sanskrit word for five, meaning five traditional ingredients? You’ll leave Black Lines enlightened and with lighter pockets.
Roundup: Horosoaps, Houseplant, Old Spice
There are so many brilliantly written product descriptions out there these days, this could go on forever. But nobody wants that. Let’s quickly breeze through a few more choice selections.
Horosoaps
Of all the brands flexing a Gen Z-style voice online, Horosoaps takes some beating. You have to love any brand brave enough to ridicule you into buying, and that’s exactly what these product descriptions for zodiac-themed soap bars do. Grow up, Pisces.
Houseplant
Seth Rogen may get stoned a lot, but he hasn’t forgotten about a single page of the Houseplant website. It’s great when you can clearly hear a famous founder’s voice coming through in every piece of copy. The deadpan product descriptions for Rogen’s weed lifestyle brand are a delight: the Standing Ashtray is simply “the ashtray that stands so you can sit”, the Ridge Ashtray was “inspired by a marvel of modern engineering: the potato chip”, and the Housecoat and Sleep Mask is “for people who take relaxation very seriously”.
Old Spice
Finally, it’s not just cool new brands who are doing cool product descriptions. Check out the Old Spice website, where the brand continues to build on the hilarious promise of their now-legendary ad campaigns. Who wouldn’t want a deodorant that “transforms unfresh men into legends of confidence”?
Long may the golden age of product descriptions continue.
Matt Duxbury is a London-based freelance senior copywriter and creative. You can learn more about him here, or on LinkedIn.