Ha Ha Ha
Brand Your is a UK-based company founded by two ambitious brothers with one bold dream — to make the designing and purchasing of branded takeout packaging a universally simpler, more enjoyable experience for businesses in foodservice and hospitality.
In the eyes of Brand Your brothers David and Will Keisner, the takeout packaging industry is a bit of a dinosaur (and not even the cool kind).
Whether you’re a mom-and-pop shop or part of a bigger chain, Brand Your believes that creating branded packaging should be easy and fun. The process should be friendlier to non-designers. Sustainable material options should be more than a nice-to-have. Order minimums should be a statement and not a surprise. Communication methods should lean into modern technology. Pre-press, production and fulfillment should be seamless and stress-free.
After 18 months of operating as an incredibly lean startup, Brand Your enlisted our help with taking their business to the next level. Their long-term vision was clear and decisive — they wanted to become the new standard for bespoke takeout packaging within the UK’s foodservice and hospitality sector. We completely overhauled their brand identity and Shopify website with new solutions that would better resonate with their customers, drive the revenue they needed to see, and signify their evolution from startup to established.
At the end of our initial branding exercise, we determined that Brand Your should position itself as playful and disruptive (as opposed to utilitarian and traditional, like some of their peers). We designed a holistic system of versatile colours, tasteful fonts, whimsical shapes and clean composition styles to express this personality, and help elevate their outward appearance as a whole. User testing was later conducted to ensure that our creative and copy strategies truly connected with our target audience.
The logomark itself can be interpreted two ways — it is both a smiling face, and a cup lid from a bird’s eye view. (The coffee cup was Brand Your’s very first product offering, and is still their bestseller to this day.)
“Through their understanding of [our] business and target customers, [the team has] developed a purposeful, relatable, and modern brand.”
David Keisner, Founder
After fully acquainting with the client’s vertical market, we dove into finalizing user personas. Our champion customer was identified as a small business owner — think coffee shop, diner or patisserie — with varying degrees of design and tech-savvy. They could be an industry newcomer still figuring things out, or a veteran who only knows “the old way.” Our end goal was to create an intuitive experience that takes the intimidation factor out of the journey for this buyer.
We devised a navigation system that would properly guide users through Brand Your’s wide portfolio of packaging solutions. Special attention was paid to product taxonomy and filtering, so users can always find what they need whether they’re more inclined to think based on use cases, product types, service offerings or sustainability choices.
On the old website, PLPs were fairly uninformative, and structured in a way that made Brand Your’s catalogue look small and limited.
We incorporated variant options (e.g. size, material, finish, printing method, etc.) and minimum order quantities directly into our product cards, knowing that these often-ignored details play a critical role in the user’s initial discovery process.
Supersized PDPs
PDPs were the main hero of the new website. We needed to harmoniously accommodate several important content modules — differentiators and specs, cross-sell recommendations, inspiration galleries and handpicked customer testimonials — while keeping conversion top-of-mind.
We learned early on that transparency around cost per unit and expected lead times can make or break buying decisions in the world of packaging, so we incorporated custom elements (not native to Shopify) that would clearly communicate quantity breaks and delivery estimates on a per SKU basis.
Key technical accomplishments
Brand Your was far from ready to invest in the development of a 3D product configurator, so the challenge was to create a step-by-step process that could effectively lead the user through the two available customization paths — all within the framework of an orthodox PDP layout. The solution we arrived at was positively received during prototype usability testing, with participants giving notable praise to the UX copywriting.
On the new website, users can customize their packaging in one of two ways. Those who happen to be savvy with creative software can upload their own artwork (using one of the many downloadable templates as a base). Others who might only have a logo can lean on Brand Your’s in-house design team for help with the rest. This service is completely free of charge, and customers are promptly contacted post-purchase to kick off the collaboration process.
Both the Cart and Account Dashboard were enhanced with additional features that we knew would be difficult to develop (based on platform limitations), but would make the buying journey more well-rounded, and address other significant pain points that are often left forgotten.
In the Cart, users can save items for later without losing any of their logo / artwork file attachments, and change product quantity without breaking any of the pricing logic (which is unique on a per SKU basis). In the Account Dashboard, users can revisit past orders and re-add products to Cart, making it easier to top-up on low stock.
Although the new website is primarily geared towards the needs of the champion customer, it also serves as a marketing vehicle for attracting the attention of larger-volume prospects. This secondary audience — made up of restaurant groups and hotels — has a very different sales cycle / process that bypasses the typical e-commerce journey.
To account for this, we included dedicated landing pages and case studies within the overall site architecture to showcase Brand Your’s higher capabilities, and encourage this persona to get in touch.
“[The] work is outstanding; we’re already seeing a major uplift because of it, and the results have been impeccable.”
David Keisner, Founder
