info@multiplestates.co.uk

Aimée Hirsch

March, 2016

A graduate of the internationally renowned Ballymaloe Cookery School, Aimée Hirsch provides a prestige catering service London’s discerning diners and their hosts.

Rifke talks to Will about how to develop engaging content and refreshing a brand.

aimeehirsch.com

What was involved in the project?

Aimée Hirsch came to us in the beginning of 2015 with a feeling that her site needed an update to her website. It was built in 2009 and a few features were not functioning as they should have been Upon further discussion it became apparent a brand refresh was also needed. We also highlighted that Aimée needed a way to make contact with her existing clients on a regular basis, so an email newsletter campaign was added to the task list. We undertook to complete this incrementally over the period of a year in order to spread the cost and allow us to experiment with the content of the newsletter campaign.

Why was the rebrand called a brand refresh?

We wanted to make sure that everyone was clear that this was not a full rebrand. Aimée was very happy with her current logo, look and feel. She had a loyal customer base who recognised it and associated it with quality catering. We did not want to lose that recognition and association. This was just a refresh. That ended up being a new typeface, the separation of Aimée’s olive twig icon with the type lockup and the dropping of the double lined borders that appeared throughout the print and digital material. The result was a very fresh feeling identity that is still instantly recognisable to her old identity.

Tell me about the newsletter section of the job. How was the content developed?

We had the luxury of being able to shape the campaign over the course of a year. The first email we sent out was a magazine style email. It had snippets of content based around one ingredient (strawberries). This content was recipes, facts, pairings etc. It was a lot of work and after the first campaign went out and we looked at the user interactions we saw that overwhelmingly, users liked the recipes best. This also chimed in with our own feelings after receiving the email in our inbox. So from then on in the newsletters were one recipe in full. This was a really nice and unobtrusive way to remind Aimée’s customers of her services.

What is your favourite part of the project?

The recipes are most certainly my favourite part of the project. Once we had them being published every month in the newsletter we could see that the news section of the site was no longer necessary and a recipe archive would be much more useful to both Aimée’s customers and to herself. She is now building an archive that she will use in her daily work, and that is always the best way to encourage engaging content.

Credits