Girl Friday Cooking Co.
It’s what I do.
Girl Friday Cooking Co.'s founder and owner, Gretchen McNary, has a passion for feeding her people. Even if she wasn't doing this for a living, she would be cooking for family and friends. It's what she does. Her weekly meal delivery and catering company specializes in fresh, never frozen, nutritious food made from scratch. Based in Morgan, PA, customers south of Pittsburgh are lucky to have her food delivered to their home or work every week. DREAM has worked with Girl Friday since it's beginning as a small home-based operation and have helped it experience steady growth year over year!
The Challenge
Girl Friday brought us in to help her build her business from the ground up. She needed a way to translate her gregarious personality and easy connection with people to a digital landscape, complete with an online ordering system. When she started, business was driven by orders from local gyms, and the food was primarily Paleo.
Along the way, the client decided she wanted expand her menu beyond Paleo. She continued to use clean and fresh ingredients, but wanted to reach a broader audience outside of the gyms. A rebranding was in order, along with an upgraded online experience.
Our Approach
As the sole design and marketing agency behind Girl Friday, we’ve been able to control the customer experience at every visual and digital touchpoint. From the language & tone that is used on the website to consistent brand colors and style, Girl Friday’s irreverent and authentic attitude is consistently portrayed. The ordering experience further reflects the client’s desire to give her customers choices and allow them to choose menu items that fit their lifestyle. After all, a Girl Friday does it all!
I want to give people options.
Technology fuels growth, or is it the other way around?
From order form to e-commerce.
The Girl Friday menu is complex. Gretchen has always insisted on providing options for her customers. Whether it’s picking a side dish, choosing salad dressing or opting out of cilantro – she likes to give people a choice. GF needed an order system to support all of this, that wouldn’t break the bank. We started with a web form, and that worked for a while. It was cumbersome and didn’t have any food photos, but it got the job done.
To improve the user experience and streamline Girl Friday internal processes, we upgraded ordering to an e-commerce solution. Costs are kept down by customizing an off-the-shelf e-commerce platform to suit the option-based ordering format Girl Friday customers are accustomed to. On the backend, reporting is more extensive and drives ingredient sourcing, food prep, packaging and delivery.
Business was growing, but the landscape was competitive. DREAM pitched Facebook and Instagram advertising to reach more customers and leverage favorable reviews. With ads featuring the weekly specials, her business has experienced steady and significant growth.
Branding
Get ready for your close-up.
Solving the Identity Crisis
Our first order of business was upgraded branding to reflect the expansion of her menu beyond food for gym-goers. We started with a new tagline–So fresh. So clean. We felt this opened her up to prepare any kind of menu she wanted and reinforced her ongoing practice of only using fresh and clean ingredients. The old-school hip-hop reference was a nod to Gretchen’s big personality and disarming charm.
Her original retro housewife themed logo was replaced with a new graphic-based logo featuring bold and clean styling of the letters GF. It’s modern and fun, just like Girl Friday!
