In a few words
When Struik Foods of the Netherlands updated their entire product range branding they saw an exciting opportunity to repackage the way they connect with their customers and tell their story online. They wanted more than the usual FMCG website, and Fablr was there to help them deliver something truly special.
Key Challenges
The Struik label has been an ever-present part of Dutch families’ weekly shop for decades. While famous for their convenience food staples like soups, stews and broths, Struik were looking for much more marked brand differentiation against competitors like Unilever.
Struik undertook a far reaching brand refresh of the entire Struik foods range that unified the visual look and feel of the products and gave it much improved separation from the competition on supermarket shelves. As part of this, the company wanted to bring the same look and feel to their digital shop window – the Struik website.
The company conducts most of its marketing via social channels, and as part of our initial presentation to the company we developed a set of user scenarios that demonstrated how (far from being just a visual makeover) their new website should be an integral part of customer engagement by supporting campaigns, product launches and promotional activities.
In addition to providing a flexible platform for their future online marketing activities, the website also had the objective of working towards being transparent about the process that goes into producing the food and proudly presenting the people who work as part of the Struik family. We wanted to tell these human stories alongside messaging that could give modern shoppers confidence in the nutritional value of the food they were buying, its provenance and welfare standards – all of which are areas Struik have invested heavily in.
Approach
Following a discovery meeting and content audit we developed a storyboard and wireframe representation of the site designed around key user journeys for different entry points.
A guiding principle for the project was offering recipe and video content that could be relevant to modern consumers and lifestyles. The structure we developed was for a scalable, fully searchable content hub where Struik could add recipes, articles and video cooking guides for their products, then create effective cross-linking between these areas and the more brand focused product and range pages.
It was clear from the beginning that the products had a more emotive story to tell. The new branding has a beautiful hand drawn aesthetic that is perfectly suited to storytelling. With that in mind, we designed the brand experience to seamlessly bringing together these illustrated visual styles with the photography Struik had of their own people in and around the factory.
Delivery
The recipes and inspiration content hub we developed is a key feature of the new website, offering visitors a wealth of ways to use Struik products in their home cooking. As well as predictive search, users can filter the recipes across a wide range of taxonomies from preparation time and mealtime to more emotionally driven categories such as “feeling adventurous” or “something warm and comforting”. This all fed into the opportunity we saw to appeal to the history people have with Struik foods – to rekindle emotive memories and stories from their childhood.
For the brand focused pages, we took the packaging artwork originally developed by strategic branding agency, The Collaborators, and developed a set of new complementary illustrations and stories that could communicate the brand message across a wide range of topics – provenance of ingredients, nutrition, lifestyle benefits and the care and attention that Struik chefs put into achieving the perfect flavour. After formulating this creative route in the design stage, we worked closely with Dutch copywriting team Buro Citreon to set the right tone for audiences in the Netherlands.
Future plans for the website include lots of new content and videos to be added over the coming weeks and months, and we are very excited about the prospect of rolling out a shopping list API that will allow users to add recipe ingredients ( including the all important Struik products) to their favourite online supermarket shopping basket directly from the recipe pages.