Hornby George

In horticultural and outdoor living PR, storytelling is the bedrock of success. For Hornby George PR, an agency deeply embedded within the garden, home, and leisure industries, the challenge is managing the scale of the storytelling process with precision.

By adopting the Vuelio platform, the agency has moved from fragmented workflows to a unified, accountable system that ensures every outreach effort is tracked, measured, and maximised, enhancing visibility, ensuring consistency in outreach, and delivering tangible results for a portfolio of prestigious outdoor living brands.

The challenge

Operating at the intersection of lifestyle and trade, Hornby George PR was founded by Kimberley Hornby George, who also serves as Co-Chair of the Garden Media Guild. The agency’s client roster includes major horticultural brands, charities, and industry bodies, all of whom require a sophisticated mix of trade and consumer PR to maintain their market positions.

‘Our work spans everything from supporting industry bodies with media relations to crafting long-term storytelling and profile building for established brands,’ says Kimberley.

‘It’s a niche that requires deep expertise, but it also demands a high level of administrative rigour to stay on top of a very specific media landscape.’

In this sector, the media cycle is heavily influenced by seasonality, from the peak of the Chelsea Flower Show to the autumn planting season. Managing these spikes while maintaining a no jargon approach to client reporting became a logistical hurdle. Before integrating a dedicated solution, the team faced the typical agency struggle of disparate spreadsheets, manually compiled media lists, and fragmented monitoring. The lack of a single source of truth made it difficult to maintain the level of accountability that the team insists upon for its clients.

‘At a high level, our goals are always centered around visibility, consistency, and accountability,’ Kimberley says. ‘We need to ensure that we aren’t just sending releases into the void, but reaching the right media contacts at the right time. We also need to track performance clearly to deliver measurable results for our clients.

‘We were looking for a way to keep everything in one place, making both team-wide and individual activity much easier to manage and monitor on a day-to-day basis.’

The goal was to find a solution that could scale with the agency’s ambitions while providing a transparent window into its activities. The team needed a platform that could handle the complexity of the specialist niche while remaining intuitive enough to be used as a primary daily tool.

The solution

After evaluating the market, Hornby George PR implemented the Vuelio platform as its end-to-end communications hub. The transition was driven by a need for a more integrated approach to public relations, one where the database, distribution, and monitoring modules worked together.

‘We use the platform across the full PR process,’ Kimberley notes. ‘It starts with building and maintaining those targeted media lists, which is vital for our specialist focus. From there, we use it for distributing press releases and managing our ongoing journalist relationships. Because the system is centralised, it keeps the whole team aligned; everyone knows who has been contacted and what the status of a lead is, which prevents any overlap or missed opportunities.’

Beyond the database, the agency relies heavily on the platform’s monitoring and reporting tools, automating the tracking of coverage across print, digital, and social media, and feeding that data directly back into the agency’s reporting workflow.

‘The biggest advantage is having everything in one system,’ Kimberley says.

‘It completely removes the need to switch between different platforms for different tasks, which creates a much more streamlined workflow. It’s intuitive and easy to pick up, which was a major factor for us. We’ve found it to be a tool that is constantly evolving, so we’re always finding new ways to use it to our advantage. Plus, the team behind the platform are incredibly responsive, which makes a real difference when you’re managing fast-moving campaigns.’

This all-in-one experience has transformed how the agency interacts with its data. Instead of spending hours cross-referencing lists and manually checking for hits, the team can focus on the creative aspects of PR – crafting the stories that resonate with the gardening public.

Results

The team has achieved a higher degree of alignment, with all media interactions logged in the platform providing a clear audit trail of activity. This has directly supported Kimberley’s goal of internal accountability:

‘We’re seeing much stronger consistency in our outreach and reporting now,’ she says. ‘There is a clearer visibility of results across all our accounts, which means we can be more proactive in how we manage our clients’ reputations. It has definitely improved team accountability and made us more efficient overall.’

Quantitatively, the agency has been able to track performance over much longer periods, allowing them to identify trends in media interest and refine their strategies accordingly. This long-term tracking is crucial for brands that need to see how their profile is building season-over-season.

‘The platform has made our PR activity more joined-up and effective,’ Kimberley says. ‘It’s made it much easier to track our performance over time and present a professional, data-backed picture of success to our clients. For an agency like ours, where expertise and transparency are our calling cards, having a platform that supports those values is invaluable.’