Sardinian Summer, German Brief

The brief arrived at 2pm on a Thursday in August. Eight pages. Tracked changes still visible. I was on a terrace in Quartucciu eating a peach.

The client was a German industrial equipment company. Family-owned, fourth generation, somewhere in Bavaria. They made components—precision-machined, aerospace-grade, the kind of thing you never see and everything depends on. The brief was thorough, correct, and had no idea what it wanted to say. It was structured the way a man explains his feelings: all the facts present, the actual thing nowhere.

I finished the peach. I opened a second document. I wrote at the top: What is the single most interesting thing about this company?

The answer, buried on page six, was that the founder's son had refused to sell to a US defense contractor in 1987 and built a civilian aerospace supply chain instead, entirely on his own terms, because he thought it was the right thing to do. That was the story. That was the brand. Everything else was specifications.

I wrote back with a brief that was four sentences long. The client called, slightly alarmed. I explained that four precise sentences are more useful than eight pages of tracked changes, and that if they disagreed we could have a longer conversation about it, but I was going to need another peach first.

They approved the concept two days later. First draft went out on a Tuesday. Nobody changed approachable.