As Bathroom Takeaway found its creative direction (more editorial, more emotional, more aspirational) a problem emerged. The brand was moving somewhere new and moving there correctly. But that somewhere was increasingly distant from where the trade audience lived.

Tradespeople don't want aspirational. They want familiar, direct, and a brand that understands how they work without needing to be told. The consumer brand's direction was right for its audience and wrong for this one.

The answer wasn't to water down the consumer brand. That would have weakened both. The answer was to build something separate and build it properly.

That started with research, not assumptions about tradespeople, but actual conversations with them. What came back was unambiguous: the things working in the new Bathroom Takeaway direction were precisely the things that wouldn't work here. Polish reads as distrust. Editorial distance reads as irrelevance. What tradespeople respond to is rawness, directness, and a brand that feels like it understands their world from the inside.

BT Trade was built from that insight outward. Industrial, utilitarian design with hand-drawn elements that feel human rather than corporate. A colour palette that carries a family resemblance to the parent brand while operating by different rules. Close enough to maintain the connection, distinct enough to signal entirely different territory.

The photography direction went furthest of all. Where the consumer brand uses controlled, editorial photography, Bathroom Takeaway Trade shoots on disposable cameras. The grain, the imperfection, the rawness. All intentional. It produces imagery that doesn't look like marketing. It looks like something a tradesperson might have taken themselves. That's the point.

The tone of voice is its own document entirely. Direct, practical, without any of the warmth or editorial register of the consumer brand. It speaks the way the audience speaks, and knows better than to do anything else.

Two brands. One company. Neither watering down the other.