In Good Company
2020 - Current
I functioned as a consultant, researcher, and full-scope brand designer
In 2020, In Good Company Nashville, a popular caterer and cafe in East Nashville, wanted to update their site and brand direction to reflect their menu, clients, and community growth. When March of 2020 hit, the In Good Company staff, like most of the country, had to pivot. The following project aimed to adapt their brand design and online presence without losing the comfortability and philanthropic feeling both founder and businesses have in their tight-knit community.
Making in Crisis
While developing a plan around Covid in our personal and professional lives we quickly developed some high level goals:
Designing and linking a digital “take out” ordering system to the existing IGC site.
Reorganize the current navigation and pages to more accurately reflect the products, services, and vendors of In Good Company.
Reflect Local Pantry’s community role and accessibility to their community through their online presence.
Those all felt big and important but we didn’t want to lose sight of those lower level goals we believed we made should be made to remain long term focus as the company not only weathers the economic and logistic storm but can later continue to grow.
Design around each specific service IGC as a company provides: catering, craft services, food for charity, etc.
Have a built, longer term, ordering system.
Unite both brands under the same visual branding.
Early Work
Early in this redesign, I heard a lot from stakeholders about a possible disconnect between the early catering business and the storefront cafe, as well as the duality between the health-driven requests customers had and their comfort-food choices, and finally, the current discoverable list of clients and the actualized one. There were immediately two distinct users/clients here: Those who wanted a women-owned and operated catering service and those looking for a popular cafe.
Community being the cornerstone of the brand’s identity we wanted to understand what East Nashville knew from word-of-mouth versus what was discoverable and develop and cater to those personas.
Understand the food scene in Nashville
Community. Community. Community. It’s safe to say that in the food and hospitality scene in Nashville, most creators know one another (and everyone else). It’s the best of multicultural transplant city with the southern comfort and hard work Tennesseans are so well known for.
Most food culture and promotion is word of mouth or the word of mouth of social media. But as I learned, that same generosity around small business, for the most part, is there. I conducted a fairly intensive initial survey to understand how people were thinking about ordering and traveling for food and what they expected from their small businesses that would remain closed longer than the larger restaurant groups.
Doing Good.
Courtney, her team, and clients were the most proud that In Good Company and Local Pantry was run entirely by and mostly for women. The charities they have worked for and with catered to bettering their community, political activation around equal rights and voter participation, and intersectional feminism.
When the March 2020 tornado hit (quickly followed by the coronavirus outbreak), Courtney and her staff fed thousands of Nashville residents.
Doing good and tasting good is in the DNA of In Good Company.
Food Feelings
In a smaller survey group stakeholders and this team wanted to understand the role that take out, cravings, and comfort played out into what people eating in times of crisis.
Many friends and competitors of Local Pantry/In Good Company were providing, like many restaurants around the US, pantry staples and market groceries at cost to substantiate their ordering options. Many competitors Toast and Square stores were filled with single lemons and bags of flour but how much of that would make sense to carry for In Good Company as well.
Throughout these surveys individuals vocalized overwhelmingly that the closures necessitated by the spread of Covid-19 expanded their capacity (and time) for learning and creating more gourmet options at home. That being said 88.7% said that they were either branching out into different flavors or shopping sporadically at supermarkets and then needing specialty items later. Overwhelmingly that supported a product hypothesis that presenting the pantry and pre-made items to SUPPORT home cooking and experimentation was best.
How might we
Create a digital space that reflects the warmth and accessibility of Local Pantry?
Develop an economy system where customers can access the meals and pantry items clearly and easily.
Highlight specials and limited items in a system where the shareholders have to be less involved. More automated?
Allow organizations to request larger orders digitally.
Expand the reach and brand awareness of IGC in a way that’s authentic to the brand?
Our Users
Kate, 29. Expediter. East Nashville.
Single lives in roommates in a 3 bedroom home. She doesn’t step foot in a lot of places she wouldn’t be considered a kind of regular or politically a like minded establishments.
During shut down she relies on the interesting supplies and drinks available for pick up from restaurants to inspire and expand her home cooking repertoire which had taken a back seat.
Her needs lie around support and self expression in her own relationship to food but also in the tight-knit community.
Jake, 42, In house graphic designer at Design Firm.
As a husband and father of two kids Jake for a while has balanced his love of the creative community in Nashville and giving his children tons of opportunities and activities that come with living in a thriving city.
Is looking to thoughtfully “throw money” at the issue of feeding his family while he and his wife work from home. Also in and out of cover closures depend on pantry staples and slightly pre made items to support the couple’s love of cooking but lack of time.
Jake reads Bon Appetit but rarely cooks from it.
Rebecca, 28. Event coordinator for Amazon.
Weekend warrior transplant that is faced in her coordinator position to be finding caterers that not only reflect the vibrancy of the food of the city but the hip districts that the city’s thriving culture is centered around.
She is encouraged by her employer to strive for out of the box chefs and thinkers that can also cater to large corporate events. She’s beefing up her rolodex with young Nashville talent that can provide her with go-tos. In the spirit of the culture of the city she wants to work with people repeatedly.
Jill, 39, Community organizer and founder of “To be Seen”
a women’s empowerment non-profit that aims to help women fight for visibility in the arts.
Socially conscious, looking for partners and collaborators not hired hands. Runs her company with a decidedly flat structure. Looking for partners that are not afraid to face the hard truths around the disenfranchised in her city.
As a female founder she does gravitate to working with and around other female entrepreneurs in hope that her endorsement might offset the city’s patriarchal structure of successful businesses.
Solving for Happy Path
New Nav
With some card sorting, meetings with shareholders and feedback from the community 4 main navigational groupings formed.
Users wanted to come to the site to check out the cafe portion of the business; Local Pantry.
They wanted an opportunity to understanding the founding and business as a whole.
They wanted to request a quote or learn about the food services Courtney and her team have available.
They wanted to see where the food is sourced and what clients and collaborators the company has had before.
Wireframes
Distinguishing the catering business from the thriving café became priority one in the viewers understanding of the company. Creating an individualized space for the cafés identity along with the covid-19 response and policy and the restaurants origins felt like a good initial grouping.
Exploring the catering, gathering, craft services, luncheons, and custom events were previously done through IGCNashville’s social. With menus and events that were constantly seasonally rotating the team had yet to establish full service menus on their site. An opportunity to group a requested quote, examples of past events, and established menus contained the many services available.
Courtney and her team both catered for and were supplied from some of the coolest brands and farms in the area. They had built such a large community of collaborators that highlighting their relationships as high points felt appropriate.
Next Steps.
The first half of this year and project has been about managing and maintaining services throughout the tumult of a local and global crisis.
The next steps for this project will be less about maintenance and more about growth and implementation using the insights and feedback the team has gotten the last few months.
Next will be recentering the previously low-level and long term goals of this project will be next as we focus on standardizing the brand, aesthetics, and interactions with the team at In Good Company Nashville.