Crieve Hall Bagel Co. Case Study
Introduction
Branding is an incredibly important part of any business, and it’s no wonder too–with some of the most successful global brands like Apple, Google and Nike funneling millions of dollars into branding and advertising each year, you know it’s with good reason. Establishing a brand for a new business comes with plenty of challenges, especially for that of small business owners. The owner of Crieve Hall Bagel Company in Nashville, TN has a website for his business, but no digital branding presence. While most of the shop’s customer base comes from WOM, the company still wants to put its best foot forward online to increase revenue. So, how might we extract element’s from the brick and mortar establishment, company logo and color scheme to generate a digital brand presence for Crieve Hall Bagel’s website?
Project Type:
3 week client project
Date:
Jan. 3, 2023-Jan. 19, 2023
Team Members:
2 UX Designers
Role:
Researcher & Lead UI Designer
Tools:
Photoshop, SquareSpace, Google Forms, Trello
The Challenge
Crieve Hall Bagel Company needs a digital presence that delivers and aligns with their unique value prop in order to increase sales and attract new customers.
My Role
Within my team, I assisted heavily in conducting research and led the way in UI and digital brand development and implementation.
The Original Design
Our Solution/Adopted Design
Introducing Crieve Hall Bagel Company
Crieve Hall is a charming little neighborhood located in the West End of Nashville, TN. Ben Cornfield started his bagel company with his wife Lizzy in Crieve Hall during the Covid lockdown right out of his kitchen after being laid off and naturally, (much like many of us) he resorted to making sourdough! The sourdough bread turned into sourdough bagels and these bagels became gifts for friends and family and as the word spread and grew greater, so did the demands for Ben to start a business selling his bagels. Finally, Ben and Lizzy opened their brick and mortar business, establishing the wildly popular Crieve Hall Bagel Company.
The Research:
We conducted 9 user interviews and pulled a number of insights, choosing to hone in on the 6 shown here to the right.
From here–and after speaking with the owner of Crieve Hall Bagel Co.–we pulled together a user persona to better grasp Ben Cornfield’s average customer/user.
Meet our user,
Caroline
Enter UI & Visual Design…
Once we gathered and synthesized as much research as we could, I immediately began scouring the Crieve Hall Bagel Co. instagram, collecting photos of the establishment, (as well as the bagels) honing in on all the little details that I believed made up all the important visual contributions to the store’s aesthetic. After pulling all these photos and viewing them together in one place, I began identifying visual trends and determining which aspects I could replicate in digital form in order to start developing a digital brand presence
Transference:
How I Designed a Digital Brand from Photos
When you walk into Crieve Hall Bagel Company, one of the first things you see is the green slat menu behind the counter. I carried this prominent and unique feature to the web design by pairing their official typeface (Roboto Slab) with the CHBCO seafoam green slat.
I carried out this same method of transference with regards to their stamped takeaway bags as well. We took the CHBCO logo and generated a stamp effect in Adobe photoshop.
The Power of Photos
From our research (and assumptions) we gathered that people often times won’t visit a restaurant unless they’ve seen photos of the food and/or establishment first, so I designed the site with these three photos as the focal point. I wanted users/potential customers to see the quality and authenticity of their bagels, all while providing the small business mom and pop shop vibe. Much of our research also showed that many bagels lovers enjoy supporting small businesses over large chains. We also built out a photo gallery page to provide visitors with a more extensive visual experience of the menu items and ambiance.
User Testing & Results
We distributed a survey to 11 testers, asking a number of questions with regards to both the original site and our proposed site (neither was addressed as such). Both sites were presented to the testers as videos and they were asked to describe each, determine the audience, and answer whether or not they would consider visiting the shop, etc. Our results were very positive and received minor recommendations for iteration, which we responded to by affixing the nav bar to the top, thus eliminating unnecessary scrolling.
Next Steps
Continue to build out/develop new CHBCO SquareSpace, carrying over new elements to existing site.
Reflections
Over the course of these three weeks, my team members and I ran into very few issues overall, with the biggest issue being access to our client. Ben is a very busy man, with a growing family, so scheduling times to meet up and discuss was difficult to achieve, though fortunately this road block was countered with a lot of trust from the client–providing us free range to do as we deemed necessary.
We had difficult obtaining what little brand guidelines were already in place (as he was still in the brand development phase), in addition to other materials, such as high resolution photos, logos, etc. We had to be very persistent and diligent in our email correspondence with the client and staff in order to obtain these crucial materials.
Our last blocker pertained to our inability to get in touch with actual users/customers. Although we asked to be put in touch with users willing to be interviewed, with Ben’s busy schedule, he was unable to do so. From here we were forced to pivot and seek out our own avid bagel lovers. These were minor challenges, so we were easily able to overcome. My team members were excellent communicators, hard working and dedicated to the project and enjoyed the whole process from start to finish. I’m very grateful to have had this working experience with both them and the client. Ben was incredibly pleased with our proposed design and we are currently implementing the site changes and updates directly to the Crieve Hall Bagel Co. SquareSpace account.