See me help a vegan caterer in Barcelona to transform their business
I have spent five months working virtually with an eco-conscious vegan catering business in 2020.
We have been actively working on their value proposition and steered it through a pandemic, set up an online hub for their documentation and eventually, made a full Squarespace website re-make and implementation for their vegan catering business.
Meet Alles Gute, my very first Spanish client and favourite plant-based cuisine hero.
We held weekly meetings through April-September, and I worked for them 0.5 days on average every week during our time together.
This case study will show you how we translated the Alles Gute business offering into a customer journey through their website. You’ll learn my holistic approach to small business development and how I think about a successful digital strategy.
If you’re a small business owner that uses Squarespace and suffers from turning their service-based business idea into a site that has a great story and keeps your values in the forefront, this article is for you.
Here’s what I’ll go through in this case study:
Meet the brand
About Alles Gute, a Barcelona-based vegan caterer
A small vegan brand with big ambitions
Alles Gute offers a new kind of catering service in Barcelona, Spain, and surrounding areas, offering a 100% vegan and eco-friendly menu.
Their vision of sustainable food pairs a holistic approach: they’re committed to addressing the concepts of global health, circular economy, zero waste food, shorter food chains and fair trade economy at the same time.
I have met with the founders, Steffen and Paola, during April 2020, when the first lockdown hit Europe. Due to our similar professional background, we immediately connected with Steffen. At the time, he was also working as a freelance consultant in various European projects - just as I did years earlier. Paola, his wife and business partner is a full-time hospital psychologist. They share a passion for the vegan and kind movement and were looking for ways to turn it into a business. Alles Gute was born in summer 2019, so I joined them not long after its inception.
In early 2020, they’ve had the following ready in their business:
A vegan catering business launched
Solid brand value proposition
Tried and tested menu
A year of experience in offering a small-scale catering service
A handful of core customers and stellar testimonials
A website on Squarespace
An Instagram profile
How do I make my catering company stand out?
With Alles Gute, Steffen and Pao developed a unique concept in Barcelona: a vegan catering business that offers both on-site catering services and a ready-to-eat plant-based food range available through an online shop. Their potential customer base consisted of event organisers, office managers and families who’re seeking a simple yet healthy solution to order catering for a small event.
On top of that, the couple had several brand superpowers that are unique to them:
They have strong values and feelings for a more eco-friendly way of doing catering,
Sustainability through their products and the entire operation is non-negotiable,
All of their recipes have been developed and tested by them,
They LOVE people, community and connection through food, and they
Both enjoy bringing an educational aspect to their work and educating others.
If you mix these two and add their dynamic approach to developing their food business in a scalable way, you get an excellent recipe for a vegan catering business.
So this is where we started.
Planning and building a catering business through a pandemic
Alles Gute had already gained some experience before the pandemic and completed a couple of events. They gathered great feedback, and they were set up in a short-term rented kitchen, ready to go. They had a capacity of catering to up to 40 people, and everything looked good. Their first approach was to create an event-based sustainable catering appealing to conference and event organisers who organise sustainability-themed events. But, as the pandemic came, it became clear to Steffen and Pao that the event industry will be inactive for a matter of time.
When we started working together, the pandemic’s long-term effects couldn’t be seen. As a start, we have discussed every part of their business, from value proposition through delivering their service to their digital strategy.
Challenges visible right away:
Need to find a permanent, more reliable kitchen space
Is looking out for events to cater to a good idea? - New pandemic food safety measures got introduced almost every day
We have seen people’s perception of safety is changing and outsight was unpredictable
How to test food products when our access to customers is limited?
Following these initial conversations, I suggested that we sum up everything we know about Alles Gute and the areas we want to work on, then divide that into actionable parts. This step is one of my favourite steps in working with another business: creating a menu of possibilities for them!
DISCOVERY
Plantconfident discovery phase
Identifying Action Areas and what needs to be done
We held regular brainstorming sessions where Steffen introduced the areas they’re working on or want to explore in the coming period. Although it seemed that we hadn’t started the actual work with these meetings yet, I find exchange discussions immensely helpful to business owners and think that it’s an instrumental step.
Through those discussions, I helped Steffen contextualise the business areas and decisions they’ve been pondering upon. What is it all for? - A question that ever so often every business owner has to ask themselves.
Small business owners usually work alone or with only 1-2 partners, and it’s easy to look over important details. Creating time and opportunity to go through aspects of the business with a professional’s help (may that be a coach, a consultant or a strategist) is an investment that pays back every time.
‘I’m really f*cking lonely!’ image by @smallbizmemez
These were the Action Areas - the full menu - we identified and brought into our collaboration:
The Alles Gute Offering & Image
Food photography & re-editing images
Presentation of the catering menu
Survey of potential clients
Recipe management tools
Content Creation & Audience growth
Supporting content on the website
Communication in social media
Website Design & Effectiveness
General guidelines of site effectiveness
Checking & introducing new functionalities
Design refresh
Website updates
Every point on this menu has become a group of tasks we started working on remotely. There were some minor ‘offline’ elements to it as the catering menu presentation, but besides that, we mainly covered digital tasks.
Digital strategy for a business covers every digital experience: it is the digital journey of everyone interacting with your business. It’s not solely about your customer’s journey with you, but also your (and your team’s) internal processes and the ease of sharing information.
I was happy because Steffen could see this immediately, without me over-emphasising the need for a holistic approach.
Prioritising tasks & setting up a shared project management space
Once we had the menu ready, we set a brief timeline and assigned priority to the Action Areas.
We quickly decided for short, easily doable tasks that could get the project going by giving us some team communication routine. We knew we wanted to start with research-type tasks and then turn the information we gain into more in-depth and even design-focused tasks. Back then, as the most further goal, we settled for a partial website redesign.
Our online working hub looked like this:
Weekly Zoom meetings for communication
ClickUp workspace to keep track of tasks and deliverables
Google Drive for documents and photo storage
We worked around a weekly in-person meeting on Zoom, kept track of all things happening between sessions in a shared ClickUp workspace and if we produced a document, images or PDFs, put it on Google Drive a shared folder.
PHASE 1
Alles Gute’s digital strategy
Checking the bases
We discussed every digital tactic, tool, and idea that Steffen and Paola tried out during our initial brainstorming meetings while building Alles Gute, past and present. When a small business owner starts thinking in digital strategy, the very first step to take is to identify the extent of their three critical systems: internal processes, customer journey and to what extent they can iterate, adjust and change within their industry. With the Pandemic lingering above the future of business, we much needed to keep an open mind towards Plan B’s and Plan C’s, uncertain of the upcoming months.
When you learn to look at digital tools as components of interconnected processes working for your goals, strategic thinking sparks. With Alles Gute, we had a great time practising that!
If you feel you’d like to go deeper and understand the components and why set up a digital strategy, go straight to my article here.
Experimenting with new, complementary tools
Once we had an overview of what digital platforms they’ve had and what is their goal with them, we stepped into the next exciting phase: researching small, complementary solutions to the existing ones. We looked up tools of various sizes and impact, offering Alles Gute help through their operation and digitals.
Tools and tactics I scanned for Alles Gute:
Per Steffen’s request, seven recipe management apps were researched and listed (see image below). We’re on the quest for finding an app that helps him to calculate recipe costing.
I explained how to install website analytics tools so Steffen could wire in a Google Analytics account to the website.
We’ve spent a LOT of time on Squarespace optimising the AG site:
It needed some ‘general housekeeping’, so I split up every page into sections for easier manageability and made small design and editing tweaks in the footer and navigation.
Before I went on holiday, I handed over a thorough guide on How to SEO on Squarespace, so Steffen had something to chew on while I was out hiking in the woods.
I added client testimonials.
We tested additional features like the calendar scheduling function provided by Acumen for Squarespace.
We tested how to build Product pages without having an eCommerce plan for the site.
‘Many, many chefs use excel still’. 😅😅
PHASE 2
Alles Gute’s business offering
Catering versus physical product development
We’ve spent about two months on Phase 1 activities, researching and experimenting with new stuff. While I was doing that, Steffen and Paola have been putting many efforts into aligning their business offering.
A decision was made: because of the uncertainty of the F&B industry during the pandemic, they would shift Alles Gute from business-to-business to mainly business-to-customer.
This, in real life, meant that they would no longer emphasise the catering service side of the business but instead, strengthen product development. They imagined off-the-shelf ready meals on the shelves of Barcelona’s fine food delis.
This was an absolutely approachable new direction, and we quickly adjusted our plans.
Translating business offering to a customer journey
Now that we had the new direction set, it was time to review EVERY part of AG’s digital strategy and decide how to change. A business offering should work hand-in-hand with the journey a customer goes on with your brand. It was clear that the old website doesn’t do this job anymore.
We enjoyed working together so much we agreed upon doing some significant changes to the website. The designer friend who designed the Alles Gute logo and set up the website was no longer around. We wanted to be as cost-efficient as possible, but it was also fun to do it ourselves from start to finish.
We discussed how a vegan catering should talk to its customers about their products, so it empowers action instead of only describing what’s on offer. How to structure the offer and what would be a right call-to-action placed on the site. Steffen and Paola are very conscious about their brand values and aspiration in business, which made the process light and enjoyable to both of us.
We moved through three phases of the project (exploration, business design & digital strategy, implementation of the business foundations to a website re-make) with such ease. It was motivating to see first-hand how Alles Gute’s new business offering informed the digital design and vice versa.
PHASE 3
Website re-make in collaboration
Around three months into our time working together, we were ready to dive into a complex and insightful process: re-making the Alles Gute website.
I don’t know if you wondered or not, but there is a reason why I consistently refer to it as a website re-make instead of a re-design. I have extreme feelings about the importance of design - physical and digital - and think that good design is a craft in good designers’ hands.
These were our priorities:
Introduce their services, products and story in an exact, easy-going way that looks and feels authentic to Paola and Steffen.
Do it collaboratively, so Steffen will have full confidence in updating or changing things later on.
Get the most value out of the Squarespace Personal plan that offers no CSS coding.
The site is bilingual, in Spanish and Catalan.
Let’s see the steps leading to a New Website for Alles Gute!
Step 1: Brand mood board and setting website objectives
First, I asked Steffen and Pao to assemble a brand mood board that’d inform our choices in Squarespace. They dove deep into visual clues and their preferences and came up with three mood board variations that consisted of photographed images in colour tones they like.
There was a clear pattern in their chosen images. It was easy to understand, harmonised, and showed details, textures and forms they especially liked and identified Alles Gute’s messages.
One of the initial brand mood boards. I love that orange colour!
We used these mood boards two-ways: Steffen and Pao started to arrange a photoshoot to get banner images, fresh portraits and captured details for the site. On the other hand, I began to play around with the colour palettes and some textures from the mood boards and created mock-ups in Squarespace.
Shortly, they had the shooting organised in Barcelona, and I had some initial draft versions of the Home Page in Budapest.
Step 2: Page layouts and building out SS sections
I like to think about websites as a story, a journey that you take with a brand. Building your copy story first is a story-led approach I used to follow when working in Squarespace.
Squarespace is a great tool to build websites, here I wrote a detailed article of what to keep in mind when you build your site there.
In Squarespace, you not only work in Pages but design each Page as a stack of Sections (called Index) - like a Jenga tower! A Section is your primary building block, that can hold media content, form fields, texts, images, links, codes, widgets etc. Depending on the functionality you’d want to enable on the site, you choose and mix some of these.
So I drafted out the copy story for each page in a gDoc in English as you see on the image below. On the top, you see the section’s key message, and then I listed what type of content needs to be added to highlight and make the message work.
Home Page layout copy story for Alles Gute
This was such a straightforward framework that we could work around, discuss the Site upbuild, and then eventually, settle on a choice that we thought would work best.
Step 3: Build-out and iterations
Once we had all of the Page Layouts settled, my turn was to build out the sections on the site’s back end.
Without bothering with the old design, I made everything from scratch and created each page, added the content and some placeholder images to see how photographs would work on the site.
My favourite tools in this part of the process:
Adobe XD for quick mockups or testing colour swaps
Eye Dropper Chrome extension to get colour codes quickly
GoFullPage Chrome extension to get a full-page overview of your site
Using the Personal Plan on Squarespace, which doesn’t allow you to overwrite the template’s CSS, was a limitation that helped me get inventive on the platform. I did SO MANY changes and tweaks to the Style settings that you couldn't tell the site is not custom code by the end.
When I was done, I handed over the task to Steffen, alongside full-length screen captures of each page to help them see through it quickly and efficiently.
They loved the site from the first moment.
We needed to clarify some questions and test out alternative variations for the banner images and some of the fonts, but that part was only the cherry on top, we were close.
Outcome
Launching the new Alles Gute website
The last rounds of tweaking and finalising the site took about a week back-and-forth between Steffen and me.
He wanted to publish the site himself - an approach I appreciate because it deepens the feeling of ownership - and took over the last tasks that needed to be done before launching the site. To support him in that, I shared with him my 20-item Squarespace Pre-launch Checklist I’ve developed through the years, and that helps me to launch new sites smoothly. It’s dropped down to finishing touches regarding the site’s content, functionality, design, SEO and bonus steps.
I consider the educational aspect as one of my most strong brand values. The more confidence I give my clients in the digital tools we apply to their business, the more successful they’ll be in the long run. If the core of your business operation or marketing depends on outside help from the first years on, you’ll be on the look for help all the time instead of making quick changes yourself.
I don’t part with my clients before I’m 100% sure they can sustain the solution I set up for them.
How the outcome reflects the Alles Gute business
Head over to www.allesgute.cat to see our project’s outcome with Steffen and Paola!
They especially liked the new site because it’s airy and light: “it doesn’t bother the eye” - said Paola, who was enthusiastic about the feminine and warm tones. The imagery they produced with a photographer’s help is genuinely impressive and communicates the brand well.
Before we did this remake, Alles Gute’s communication wasn’t clear about when and how they’re offering their services, the financial implications of a catering bundle, who they are as the business owners, and how their clients enjoyed the food experience they offer.
It’s also important to mention that the fact they’re a couple running and styling this brand finally comes through, offering people a choice to connect to them.
Purpose-driven founders: “To us, this business is so much more than a food service.” Image credit: allesgute.cat
Improved website effectiveness
By rewriting the Alles Gute website’s copy story and installing new imagery that supports it, we improved its effectiveness.
What does website effectiveness mean? It means that when a potential customer lands on your site, they can immediately gasp 1) what you do 2) are you for them 3) how can you help them and 4) what is their next step if they want to connect with you.
Elements of telling a clear and compelling story that helps your homepage hit your objectives:
Identify who you’re talking to and make sure your audience will recognise themselves as your business’s target.
Speak to a pain point or need your customer currently has.
Position your offering as a solution.
Describe how their life will be better on the other side of buying from you.
Be memorable and add your authentic spin to stand out.
Make it clear what action they need to buy from you / hire you.
That’s a wrap
I can’t recall a dull moment during the five months we’ve been working on Alles Gute with Steffen and Paola.
We’ve set ourselves up for a productive, efficient and successful job. After talking through every part of their business, we targeted their digital strategy and completely rewrote the elements they’re communicating through their website - verbally and visually.
We pushed Alles Gute through the necessary strategic changes in 2020, so the service can have a fresh and dynamic start.
There are many things I genuinely enjoy working on. Setting up and optimising a digital strategy for businesses might be my most favourite thing.
If you want to work on your business and think that a similar setup we had with Alles Gute would suit you, don’t hesitate to drop me an e-mail!
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Thumbnail image credits: Photograph by Alles Gute 2020, Badge by Kristin Hogan from the Noun Project.