handsome Launches a Modern, Humanized Brand Experience for Meal Delivery Service Snap Kitchen
Following their recent relaunch, branding and experience design agency handsome has partnered with trailblazer meal delivery service Snap Kitchen to completely modernize their e-commerce and brand experience in the face of COVID-19.
Beginning as a brick-and-mortar business with several locations across the southern United States, Snap Kitchen offered a quick and convenient way to grab a healthy, freshly-prepared meal on the go. As meal kit services grew in popularity online, however, the company soon began offering its meal plans for delivery. With the onset of COVID-19, stay-at-home orders greatly increased the consumer desire for healthy deliverable meals and made most brick-and-mortar stores irrelevant, forcing Snap Kitchen to lean more heavily into an online market that was saturated long before the pandemic began.
Facing the crisis, Snap Kitchen tapped handsome to help reshape its brand experience for a growing online market, using in-depth consumer insight research to reposition itself to best serve their customers. The agency’s holistic approach allowed Snap Kitchen to refocus its understanding of its target customers, both of today and of the foreseeable future, and optimize its offerings for a rapidly changing world.
“Snap Kitchen had been evolving for nearly ten years,” explains Co-Founder and CEO John Roescher. “And then the pandemic came along. So to really hit the mark we were aiming for, we knew we had to deconstruct the brand, the truths of its products, and the reality of its business operations. For example, when it came to designing the product packaging, we took a step back and asked, ‘What should the Snap Kitchen experience be in the home? What are people doing and thinking before, during and after receiving their weekly subscription box? Is it a fun moment or a tedious chore?”
Drawing creative inspiration from other meal kit delivery services as well as DTC brands outside the health or food industries like Warby Parker and Kin Euphorics, handsome studied the relationship between digital shopping, receiving products in the home, unboxing, managing subscriptions, and more. This research informed all aspects of the new brand strategy, allowing handsome to execute an updated creative direction across brand touch points, from the brand’s website all the way to the clean and fresh packaging design.
“Snap is about healthy food fast,” Roescher says. “The new brand gets out of the way and shows the freshness of the food while featuring the speed and convenience of building and receiving subscription boxes as well as on-demand delivery. This is reflected in the smooth, clean and quick UX of the new website, the messaging and the simplified packaging that all promotes the ease of using the service, puts the nutrition information front and center while also bringing the fun personality of the brand forward with little silly things like the gift of a ‘Snap Spork’ on their third box. In the overarching collaboration, handsome handled everything from consumer insight research and brand and customer experience strategy to brand photography, art asset creation, full stack e-commerce design and development, digital product redesign, and packaging design for direct to consumer packaged products.”
handsome’s holistic work with Snap Kitchen celebrates and uplifts the brand’s commitment to its motto, “Healthy food for busy people.” The message has already started connecting with audiences, with the new website seeing a 80% increase in new customer subscription conversion. All these touch points culminate in a brand experience that drives home the values of getting healthy food to busy people who care about what they eat — a welcomed little luxury in an uncertain time.
Roescher sums it up, saying, “We believe that brands are the sum total of all their parts. You can’t create or change a single part of the brand and customer experience ecosystem without impacting the whole. This requires a holistic approach to brand experience design, which is a huge undertaking. We’re incredibly proud of the effort the whole team put forward to make this happen.”
Snap Kitchen CEO Anthony Smith agrees, adding, “From the start, handsome has been extremely quick to understand our brand and the customers we serve. They truly became an extension of our team and provided valuable data driven guidance at every turn. They’ve been essential in creating a cohesive physical and digital experience that’s set the foundation for us to scale at an accelerated rate going forward.”