SMC X Saviour Foods
Overview
Saviour Foods is a handmade vegan cookie brand in Vancouver, BC. The client, Anna is the founder and business owner of Saviour Foods. Anna also owns the Garden Strathcona, a cafe in Vancouver, where she began selling the cookies in the bake shop. The cookies took off and since then, she has created a line for these cookies, giving them their own website and social media pages. This client was acquired in September of 2020, where I, Veronica Dyment, and my team of 4 consultants, Maddy Brody, Austin Gust, Celena Lin, and Cecelia Lopez would be working with her for the remainder of 2020.
The Problem
The ASK that our team was prompted with was to transition the Saviour Foods current website on Squarespace and move it onto Shopify. The second ASK was to curate ideas for Saviour Foods social media page for a social media strategy. When looking at the business before it was acquired by SMC, it was visible that the website had great content but required stronger visual hierarchies and an easy to navigate design. As well, the website needed interactive content and more informative information on what differentiates the business. The website also needed to have a stronger backend that allowed for fulfillment of multiple orders; something Shopify could provide. As far as the business’s social media, it required more informative posts to incentivize users to engage with it’s Instagram. This negatively affected the business because it does not enable consumers to further engage with the business. As well, it does not inform them of the benefits of purchasing the product; in other words, misses the business’s “Why”. When looking at Saviour’s competition, there are a few direct and some indirect. For example, the first direct competition of Saviour Foods was found to be Dough&Co, a vegan cookie brand out of Vancouver. Another direct competitor was The Gluten Free Epicurean, a bakery in Vancouver but well known for their vegan cookies. Examples of indirect competitors were grocery stores, such as Whole Foods, that sell regular boxed cookies. Though they did not offer directly what our client offered, they provided an easy and similar substitute for her product.
The Solution
When looking to solve these issues, my team and I began with the curation of a project proposal that laid out the issue, our approach to solving this issue and a timeline. To find the issue we analyzed the current website and social media through a SWOT analysis to see areas where they excel and areas we can aid in improving. We also incorporated the training we learned from Ron Tite to discover what the business currently Thinks, Does, and Says and how we can leverage its current initiatives and enhance them.
I split up our team into two workstreams, the first was the website workstream where Austin and Celena worked on the transition from Squarespace to Shopify. Both had experience on the Squarespace platform and were able to navigate through the transition. The second workstream was the social media workstream where Cecelia and Maddy worked to create a plan and strategy for Saviour as well as a holiday campaign. Both had experience with social media branding and graphic design. My team and I met weekly to align with what we had done so far and then to set out tasks for the following week. This ensured brand consistency on both the website and social media pages. It also allowed the team to brainstorm as a whole while giving the opportunity for both workstreams to bounce ideas off one another. By the end of the project, Saviour Foods had a fully functioning and redesigned Shopify website that was visually appealing and displayed content that aligned with the social media content created. It also had added testimonials, an in-depth analysis on the eco-friendly aspect of the product, and a step by step “how to bake” page. As far as the social media, Saviour Foods had a holiday campaign strategy with edited photos and caption ideas. The team also created a revamped social media strategy with ideas that can be used after the project has finished. Before wrapping up, both workstreams presented to the client website and social media tips and ideas going forward.
Highlights
My team and I are grateful for what we’ve learned from working on this project and the skills we’ve gained from the process. For starters, it was interesting to see just how competitive the vegan market is, especially on the west coast, and the difficulty in differentiating a brand within that market. The company is agile and we believed would be successful across the country due to the rising trend of healthy eating. Since it is called Saviour Foods, we also believed there was room for product line growth outside of just cookies leaving opportunities for Saviour to stretch into new markets. We learned the indirect competition was going to be hard to beat and that instead, Saviour could begin looking to get into several grocery stores to continue making a name for itself and gain reputability. This project was a great learning experience for market strategies. It allowed us to analyze what worked well and what didn’t for both Saviour Foods and their competition. We saw the importance of interactive posts such as Polls, Story’s and Giveaways. The final highlight was our team’s relationship. We started off not knowing each other and by the first week we were already working cohesively due to a strong common goal. It was rewarding seeing the team evolve, grow and help each other from start to finish of the project.
As a team, we developed skills in website building, specifically on Shopify. After previously working for Shopify, I was able to guide my team through the platform. We also built skills in graphic creation and branding when the social team and I took pictures of the product and designed our own content. We are now able to leverage these experiences for each project we work on in the future as well as bring these skills to the classroom and the workplace.
Key Takeaways
In order for our team to be successful it was important we set up a project outline that was in depth and explained every aspect of the strategy going forward as well as a timeline. We also benefited from meetings with the business owner to keep us aligned with her end goals and our approach to reaching those. We benefited from the training modules as well as the training from Ron Tite that guided us through the integral parts of curating a marketing plan and strategy.