Process
Jump to:
Background — Brand Development — Testing — Launch — Refresh
Team
Creative Direction: Nicole Timmerman, Katie Bolt
Design: Emily Bass, Serena Moy, Karrah Toby, Nicole Timmerman
Photo + Video: Julie Young, Skalawag Productions, Jason Richardson
Copy: David Anthony, Shannon Nolan
Brand Consultant: Manny Fernandez
Background
In September of 2023, Home Chef launched a new sub-brand, Tempo by Home Chef, a healthier, single-serve microwavable meal delivery service. Similar to Home Chef’s core business, Tempo offers a variety of meal choices every week, all of which get delivered directly to your doorstep and cook in just 3 minutes.
Armed with the operational capabilities to make pre-cooked meals at our plants across the US and a growing interest by consumers in the microwave meal space, Home Chef decided to toss their hat into the ring. My team was tasked with the entire brand conception and execution.
Brand keywords
Approachable
Inspiring
Youthful
Target audience
Busy people living an active lifestyle. While Home Chef’s core menu tends to be mostly female over the age of 45, the new brand aims for a 50/50 split between genders under 45.
Competetitors
brand development
task 1: naming, Feb—May 2023
With no time to waste, our copywriting team spearheaded naming the brand and product. Brand stakeholders wanted to represent how the product could fit naturally within a busy person’s life and schedule, without missing a beat. The themes of rhythm and musicality rose to the surface, and Tempo was ultimately chosen from 700+ proposed names.
task 2: brand + logo concepting, May—july 2023
With a name chosen, my design team began sketching logos and ideating basic branding. We created three directions to show our brand team, who, after focus group testing, ultimately chose to move forward with one of the concepts with a few modifications.
Concept chosen by Home Chef Brand team.
Launch, September 2023
360 Marketing deliverables
Brand guidelines
Packaging
Emails
Landing Pages
Paid media
Videos
Direct Mail
Brand direction decided, the Creative Team took on the task of creating launch materials that spanned packaging, digital, print, and broadcast.
And the launch was met with….sub-par results.
With CPAs in the $900 range, high numbers of paused and cancelled accounts, and inconsistent meal reviews, we knew we needed to optimize and evolve the product and brand. A new keyword was also tossed into the mix by leadership: premium. How do we better show the product’s quality to therefore justify a higher price point?
Back to the drawing board.
Refresh, September 2024
With quality and health now at the forefront of our marketing strategy, the team looked to gain an outside perspective on how well our brand represented this new direction, and what changes we could make to better align with the new brand trajectory. To do so, we hired an external consultant to work alongside our in-house team.
Along with brand updates, other teams continued to evolve the product to improve things like meal taste, health claims, funnel experience, and fulfillment issues for a refresh customer experience.
We made tweaks to the color palette by deepening and enriching the hues, and limiting the number of colors in the palette.
We decided to switch Roc Grotesk to Aktiv Grotesk. Roc’s uniqueness gave it a more novel appearance, and felt limiting in use.
The e-commerce box and meal sleeves were updated to the new brand blue.
Brand updates to all channels continue to roll out through the end of 2024.