The Situation
A business paying for a platform nobody was using.
Heaton Group had invested in Leat, a loyalty platform designed to reward trade customers and repeat buyers. It had been bought, configured and added to the monthly cost base. It had never actually been switched on. The software sat dormant while the invoice kept arriving, a quiet drain on capital that was easy to miss in a busy operation.
The Leat platform was only part of the picture. The wider systems stack had been bought piece by piece over time. CRM, email, finance and operational tools were all in place, but nobody had joined them up into a workflow the business could trust. And sitting above all of that was Cotton Works itself: a genuine destination workplace in Wigan with a growing family of brands and experiences under one roof, and a website that did not yet tell that story.
The Process
Activate, connect, join the dots.
The engagement was not about buying more. It was about turning what Heaton already owned into something commercial, and then making sure everything the group offered at Cotton Works was visible, navigable and connected. Work ran in parallel, with commercial priority given to anything already being paid for.
Leat Loyalty Platform Activation
Audited the existing Leat loyalty platform, defined the commercial objectives it should support, set up tiers, rewards and customer communications, and moved it from a dormant licence into a live programme earning its keep. What had been pure cost became a retention and repeat purchase asset.
Systems Setup & Integration
Set up and connected the core systems the business was already paying for. CRM structured around real customer segments, email and marketing automation wired to actual behaviour, finance and operational tools aligned so the commercial team could see the same picture as the board. A stack that worked together instead of a collection of logins nobody trusted.
Cotton Works Website Planning
Planned the new group website as a destination hub. Cotton Works has multiple brands and experiences on site, and the website had to connect every one of them: what you can do, where you can do it, who it is for. Information architecture, messaging hierarchy, conversion pathways and a creative direction the internal team could brief against, all pointing to a single, coherent picture of the destination.
Brand Values for the Group
Developed a clear set of brand values for Heaton Group, grounded in how the business actually behaves, not how it wishes it behaved. A short, memorable framework the leadership and operational teams could use to make decisions consistently across every part of the group.
Brand Values
Values grounded in the work.
The brand values for Heaton Group were developed through direct conversations with the leadership team and tested against the way the business actually behaves with its customers, its suppliers and its own people. Each value is a real characteristic of the group, not a statement of intent.
The Result
A business working with what it already owned.
The Leat loyalty platform went from a dormant line item to a live programme with customers earning, redeeming and coming back. The systems stack became something the commercial team could actually use. The Cotton Works website was planned end to end, with every brand and experience on site joined up into a single story the visitor could follow.
The underlying lesson for Heaton Group was simple and valuable: the money had already been spent. The job was to make it work. A fractional CMO engagement that started by activating assets already on the balance sheet freed capital, sharpened the commercial operation, and set Cotton Works up to present itself as the destination it genuinely is.
“Constance got under the bonnet of the business, found the things we were already paying for and made them work. Then she gave us a proper plan for how Cotton Works should show up online. It was practical from day one.”
Heaton Group Leadership