Restaurant Group
Just Eat Local
For twenty years the team behind Bittercreek Alehouse, Red Feather Lounge, and Diablo & Sons Saloon contributed to the story of Boise through thoughtful food, good beverage, and great people. Over time, they refined their approach by producing articles, videos, photos, and more; emphasizing locally-sourced food, craft drinks, the culture in the kitchen and on the farm, and everything in-between. Along the way they continue to forge as many meaningful connections as possible to bring our patrons and readers closer to those who make the community and culture what it is.
I was hired by Just Eat Local as their Creative Director to bring this initiative to life by creating a team of employees and contractors to help build a visual identity, content, digital marketing, social media, and handle their public relations for all of their brands.
Role:
Creative Direction
Marketing & Social strategy
Identity Systems
Graphic Design
Apparel Design
Messaging
Copywriting
The Problem:
Just Eat local and its affiliate brands lacked a social and marketing strategy and much of their visual identities had little to no assets to use to help tie the brick and mortar experience to their websites, socials, merch, and more. One of the bigger issues was that Just Eat Local as a parent company had no brand equity with any of the restaurant's patrons.
The Objective:
The goal was to roll out refreshed visual Identities for each brand and an overall marketing and social media strategy to increase engagement and awareness of the parent brand. By making each identity more flexible and responsive we would increase our visibility via different channels and create a more youthful look.
The Solution:
Brooke Foster and Nathan Warner audited the previous brand assets and put together an identity system per brand that had its own unique style: Logo, Color, fonts, patterns, and photo treatments. We then approached Visionkit Studios to help us with photographing our restaurants, menu items and to create custom photo treatments per brand. We also hired Idaho Websites to revamp the old websites and streamline the programs we used to reduce our monthly costs, as well as an ecommerce shop to create additional revenue opportunities. We then spent a month identifying where we could have the most impact and concluded that our email newsletter, posting articles on Just Eat Local, posting on social media reels, and photos to our feed would generate more engagement with a consistent look and feel to help viewers better understand the brands offerings.
Marketing Strategy
We started with addressing what paid, free, analog, and digital opportunities were available for each brand. Once we established our markets we addressed what platforms, frequency, and budget we had to work with to ensure we were reaching the right people. We then looked at statistics and numbers available to us about who is using those channels, and best practices.
Auditing the brand:
We began by asking owners Jami Adams and David Krick what the stories were behind each restaurant, to better understand what their intentions were with each business. When we had our stories straight, we looked at old designs, menus, books, and anything the internet had to offer to better understand how we could visually represent each brand.
Identities get a new-ish look
Each restaurant had a logo, and some associated elements, but there was no continuity between the interior design, the menus, website and social. We also noted a lack of responsive qualities so we began building responsive marks to tack onto the existing brands so we had more flexibility in their designs
Photography
We needed new photos and photo treatments to better help tell each brand's story. We spent a month working on a style guide that helped us better articulate our goals for working with Visionkit and to better help them understand where we were headed. The result was 3 treatments that give each restaurant a unique visual appeal.
Red Feather Lounge
Environment:
• Modern lounge
• Cocktail focused
Styling:
• Darker backgrounds
• Simple presentation
• Focus on single items
• B&W & Color balanced
Props:
• Cocktail glasses
• Ingredients of drinks or food
• Marble top/darker tones
Lighting:
• Dark and moody
Bittercreek Alehouse
Environment:
• Relaxed Pub
• Playful/Messy food
• Beer focused
Styling:
• Dark Wood Surfaces
• Butcher Paper or wood surface
• Messy presentation
• French fries spilling over
• Beer overflowing
Props:
• Beer Glasses
• Long wall of beer taps
• Butcher / parchment Paper
• Coasters
Lighting:
• Mildly bright and warm
Diablo & Sons Saloon
Environment:
• Saloon inspired
• Minimal yet loose. Ingredients / props surrounding the food
• Beer, Whiskey, and Mezcal
Styling:
• Mix of dark and light surfaces
• ingredients on the table
Props:
• Liquor bottles
• Textured surfaces
• Hand made ceramic plates
Lighting:
• Mix of dark and Soft light
Websites
Our websites were scattered across different applications, programs, hosts, and a slew of other subscriptions that were costing the business an unnecessary amount of money. We brought Idaho websites in to simplify the situation by putting us on one hosting site, building in google analytics, and finally building out our websites based on our identity systems and some creative direction to ensure things were on track. Previously, Just Eat Local did not have its own website, and Bittercreek had a blog built into its website. To create more equity in Just Eat Local, we decided to turn it into a media outlet focused on food, beverage, culture, and more associated with the food culture in the state of Idaho. The result is a wide range of articles and videos that are educational, serious, fun, and informative. Finally we brought on the e-comm shop to help better sell our apparel products, gift cards, and headwear to generate more passive income. 1 year since the launch and we have seen huge spikes in our engagement on each site. We even came out with a 4 episode video series called “Beer Time with Cody,” a satirical show about beer education.
Apparel
Some of the apparel on the floor at Bittercreek Alehouse and Diablo and Son’s had been in circulation for years. We felt it was time to start creating pieces that would be comparable to items we saw in the market. With a few days of research we found some commonalities in the market that seemed to sell through well to those who regularly attended Bittercreek and Diablo. We designed shirts and hats that were geared towards our customers and in doing so we’ve seen a huge spike in apparel sales.
Social Media Strategy
We researched where our engagement was with the previous usage of instagram. We implemented the photos from Visionkit into our feed to help patrons better understand what the “vibe” of each restaurant is, while focusing our time and energy on making engaging reels that boosted our engagement and better told the story of how our food is made. Just Eat Local was the last to be addressed because we wanted to work out how best to represent the articles. We decided that posting a story on JEL and the other brands, paired with a post in the feed was going to be the most effective way of getting people to the website.
