sweetgreen
sweetgreen came to us with a big aspiration for their future: to challenge the broken food system. While their new brand design (from our friends at COLLINS) and product offering were successfully making this exciting ambition a reality, their digital ecosystem was holding them back in many ways.
We needed to figure out how to unify a disjointed site experience, how to hand back power to a marketing team that had lost control of the site’s all important metrics, and how to advance key tech fundamentals like the CMS, SEO, accessibility and performance… all while unlocking the storytelling power of a new brand.
A unified experience
With 6 different sites and unclear user journeys, we got to work identifying immediate areas of ROI — for example, streamlining ordering for customers by placing intelligent entry points in the nav and embedded in the landing page. This allowed the sweetgreen team to use continuously updated data to guide marketing decisions and led to a rapid transformation in conversion rates.
Performance, performance, performance.
The disjointed history of the site meant that the sweetgreen team had very limited tools for understanding the site’s performance. Bounce rates were high, and with 16 places to check analytics, useful metrics were hard to come by. Our new site system established baseline KPIs that were accurate, reliable, and would inform future decisions.
Tech stack: friend, not foe.
“Our dream is to be able to spin up a website quickly at a moment’s notice, without bugging engineering” — this was one of the most common pieces of feedback in our initial stakeholder interviews. With ADA and CCPA compliance front of mind, we built a CMS that transformed the site into a hard-working marketing tool. No longer constrained, the sweetgreen team were able to identify new ways to generate a return on their campaigns and content.
A new brand, elevated
With new clarity, direction, and firepower in the site’s architecture, usability, and tech stack, we turned our attention to the latest brand work and realized our biggest opportunities lay with the balance of two powerful forces: selling and storytelling.
With so much thought put on conversion, we were very conscious that not everyone wants a purely transactional relationship with sweetgreen. For customers who want to know more, we needed to help them find the stories that will pull them closer the brand and unlock our strategic platform of “Creative Curiosity”.
