Modern Persian Kitchen: Brand Launch & Full Service Design Creative
A celebration of Persian cuisine showcasing our families heritage and modern fusion cooking
The story
Modern Persian Kitchen is an award winning company with food at its core. The Jahangiry Family hope to evoke beloved memories from their heritage with an expression of identity with each dish taking Chef Shary back to his roots, back home watching over his mum cooking - a small tribute to the food he grew up with as a child.
Background
Growing up I had a true love for Persian food, sharing it with everyone and anyone who would try it. While at uni on a regular occasion, I would call Dad for help to create a feast for my friends, longing to have a taste of the unique dishes I grew up loving. As I moved to London the need to fulfil my cravings only grew and I began to get frustrated at the lack of Persian food on offer, so my parents would send regular food packages to get me by.
In 2018 my Mum (Debbie) had an idea to make Persian food more accessible to households across the country and as a family we put our heads together to bring to life an opportunity to leverage our combined backgrounds and provide other families with a taste of their beloved heritage.
The details
As a Co-Founder in a small start up I took on vast array of roles and responsibilities within the business. Drawing on my previous experience in advertising and learning along the way I have spent 5 years crafting and curating the company into the renowned brand it is today.
Business branding and development: From the look and feel, branding and colour palette to brand strategy, tone of voice and copywriting - I worked on the set up and build of the brand and effective implementation of this across different mediums.
Ecommerce site development: Starting off it's life on Squarespace I designed and developed the platform for Modern Persian Kitchen to live. As a business we mainly deliver direct to customer so the website itself is the main tool in allowing the business to function and facilitate sales. After a few years hosting on Squarespace I migrated the site to Shopify to allow for a more effective experience both on the customer side and in the back end from a business perspective.
The build resulted in an increase in sales, site traffic and organic SEO. It not only proved a success on the customer facing side, but gave the business flexibility on the backend, allowing for easy product placement, analytics and stock control.
Using both Squarespace and Shopify to host the website I am now quite experienced in both platforms in designing and building fully functioning e-commerce sites.
Food and product photography: Taking on all visual and functional aspects of the business I set up and photographed brand products, food in situ and brand content to be used across the website, social media and print materials.
Social media: Strategy, content creation and management of social platforms. Growing our business organically was vital to success in early years and Instagram became key in our word of mouth strategy. Creating a sound tone of voice, visual overview and content that allowed the customer to have a glimpse into family life as well as showcase the product was put in place while I also took on the day to day management of customer interactions, video content and posts. Tiktok and Facebook were also used as secondary platforms to generate sales through organic means.
Social strategy focus on User Generated Content and Influencers to push the brand awareness. Curated content also created with well known brands alongside competitions to build a strong strategy base in order to grow the audience organically without having a main focus on paid media and advertising.
CRM: Creating and designing regular email updates and newsletters to customers through Shopify and Klaviyo which included customer flows in Klaviyo and following analytical patterns to retarget customers depending on their online behaviour.
Event styling: As part of our offering I organised, styled and produced creative for a supper club evening in London. This included floral and table arrangements, signage and menu design.
Case Study 1: Successful funding raise on Seedrs for investment that saw Modern Persian Kitchen raise 116% of the target from 159, allowing for growth in 2022.
As a family company we know the value and importance of our customers and community so crowdfunding proved to be a vital role in our journey. Not only did it give us the opportunity to raise funds, it allowed us to build a network of advocates for the business and advertise our offering on a renowned worldwide platform.
What is most commonly the case in start up's, utilising skills in-house across a variety of different sectors is what is needed in order to grow. Being the Creative Director Co-Founder of the business, I took on the role of crowdfunding lead which involved developing a pitch campaign to secure funding in order to allow for company expansion.
Having never raised funds before, I enrolled in a training course with ISQ Crowdfunding that involved months of detailed development, business analysis and understanding which in turn allowed me to put together pitch materials, financial forecasts and reports to present on the public facing platform.
I also worked hand in hand with a videography company to concept and feature in a campaign video, giving insight into the business offering while also ensuring it encapsulated our tone of voice as a business from our families story to our heritage values.
On campaign launch I then lead the pitch push for investment through social platforms, CRM and one to one meetings, calling on our customers, social following, friends and family, resulting in £88,000 investment from 159 investors at a total of 6.8% equity released in total.
View the full campaign on Seedrs and the full pitch document here.
Case Study 2: Website transition to Shopify for the Modern Persian Kitchen D2C website.
Direct to customer sales were a large proportion of the MPK offering therefore having a smooth customer journey to cart is key. Recognising this I moved platform to E-commerce specialist platform Shopify to help Modern Persian Kitchen grow and provide a more effective offering.
Squarespace was a great platform to get going on initially when we started, however there were a myriad of pain points being experienced on a day-to-day basis that could be solved by switching to Shopify. So after researching the proposition I took the leap into learning a new platform software to allow us to create the new site in-house.
Building the new site in Shopify while migrate customer content I also moved over some of the original content, but redesigned and developed the structure of the user interface to allow for a quick and smooth transition to cart. A template was used for basic structure and some features, but I created most of the UI from scratch, with code injections and widgets to allow for custom development where needed.
The build resulted in a large increase in sales, site traffic and organic SEO. It not only proved a success on the customer facing side, but gave the business flexibility on the backend, allowing for easy product placement, analytics and stock control.
View the Modern Persian Kitchen site here.
Case Study 3: Organic sales push through email and social for Modern Persian Kitchen
Using Klaviyo flows and campaigns to capture potential customers and retarget sales leads through email while pushing social content to drive sales.
As a company Modern Persian Kitchen had never used email marketing as a tool in growing sales. With the launch of the new website in Feb 2022 it was decided that emails should be a part of our advertising strategy moving forward. Using Klaviyo to design, create and develop emails I have designed a constant stream of communication with our customer and subscriber base.
Through the use of campaign based emails we could send offers, give news, advertise products and share recipes. I also built groups based on our subscriber audience base to target with different campaigns based on their individual needs and interests.
Using flows also allowed us to create a welcome series once a customer had ordered encouraging them to order again, cross sell products, chase win back opportunities and retarget abandoned cart leads all through automation.
Tracking the analytics across campaigns and flows allowed me to keep track of different group emails and the open rates and to see the success of each email itself. I then used this data to strategise and target in response to drive further sales.
With the use of email marketing we generated an additional £1800 of sales in the first month alone.
Using Instagram as another platform to drive organic traffic, I tailored the offering we had built to expand and engage customers in an interesting way. Basing a strategy around the community we had built I focused on reels to provide content across a variety of different topics, taking the focus away from product only shots and refocusing on reels based around our story, family life, recipes and short ad spots posting from a first person narrative.
In 3 months we had a 32% increase in followers with 65% more engagement than previously. This in-turn lead to an increase in website sales by 26%.
