The unexpected thing our four awards have in common

Why I think Ace Places has won four very different awards

One of the things I’ve found really interesting about the awards Ace Places has won is just how varied they are. We’ve now been recognised for marketing, innovation, entrepreneurship and community, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what that says about the business. I think the answer is that the idea behind the packs has really captured people’s imaginations.

When I first came up with Ace Places, the concept was simple: create a beautiful pack of playing cards that doubles up as a local guide, with each card shining a light on a brilliant business, charity, event or hidden gem. What I hadn’t quite appreciated at the beginning was how quickly people would start seeing other possibilities for the format. I’ll show someone a town pack and almost immediately they start saying things like, “You should do one for our town”, “Could you do one just for pubs?” or “Could we have one for our company?”

That has happened again and again, and it has definitely shaped how I now see the future of Ace Places. We are still very much a small start-up, but we have big plans. We are working on taking the town and city packs into more places, which is a huge part of where the business is going next, but the more conversations I have, the more obvious it becomes that the idea can go much further than that.

You could create a pack dedicated entirely to pubs, or hotels, or visitor attractions. You could make one for a collection of venues, a charity, an event, or an organisation with lots of places, people or stories worth discovering. In fact, we’re now properly set up to create bespoke packs for businesses, brands and organisations that fancy having a deck of their own.

That feels like a really exciting next step for me because the format is so flexible. A pack can be a guide, a gift, a keepsake, a marketing tool, a fundraiser or simply something fun that people genuinely want to pick up and use. It doesn’t have to feel like branded merchandise. It can actually tell a story and give people something they want to keep.

I think that is probably why Ace Places has managed to fit into four such different award categories. It is a product, but it is also about storytelling. It is marketing, but it is also about community. It is commercial, but it still has a real sense of place and purpose behind it. Most importantly, people seem to understand the potential very quickly, and then start imagining what their own version could look like.

For a small start-up, that is hugely exciting. We are still building, testing and learning as we go, but the response so far has made me feel there is something much bigger here.

So if you’ve ever thought, “We should have our own pack of cards”, I would genuinely love to hear from you. Check out our Bespoke Packs page, get in touch and we can hatch a plan.