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Pellucid · Bristol, England
Technical credibility rebuilt for a company whose buyers are engineers and whose critics are everyone else.
Pellucid designs treatment systems for municipal and industrial water. Its buyers are procurement engineers who want evidence; its wider audience is a public that has learned, with reason, to distrust anyone in the water business. The company was writing one set of material for both and satisfying neither.
Two audiences, one standard of proof — the public was not asking for simpler language, it was asking for the same evidence.
The instinct was to write a technical layer and a reassuring public layer. The interviews said otherwise: the public did not want to be reassured, it wanted to see the numbers the engineers saw. Publishing one body of evidence, well explained, turned out to be both cheaper and more credible than maintaining two voices.
The system is built on a diagram language rather than photography — treatment stages drawn as a consistent set of chambers, rules and measures that can describe any Pellucid installation. It is deliberately unglamorous. Nothing in the visual system asks for trust; the whole argument is carried by how completely the work explains itself.
Pellucid now publishes the same evidence to both audiences and has stopped maintaining a separate public-facing story, which removed a standing internal argument as much as an external one. The Catchment is written by the engineering team with editorial support rather than by a marketing department, and that authorship is the reason it is trusted.
Lumaire is a fictional company created for a HubZero Blueprint. The figures above are illustrative demonstration content, not measured results.
We assumed the public wanted a simpler story. Lumaire pushed back hard on that and they were right — what people actually wanted was to see the same numbers our clients see.
Next step
Pellucid came to us with a version of the same problem most of our clients have: something specific and true that had stopped being said clearly.