Delicious. Delivered. Divine. Not the first 3 words you might associate with vegan food. Until Holy, a subscription service that brings vegan meals based on nutritional science to your door. Winner of best strategic & creative brand at Transform Awards.
Context
Following a vegan diet takes a lot of knowledge and careful planning, or you risk missing vital nutrients and vitamins. No wonder there are myths about vegan food being boring, uninventive, and limiting performance. Our client decided to launch a pioneering vegan delivery service aimed at those who want to eat healthy, environmentally conscious food – and even reach fitness goals on a completely plant-based diet – without sacrificing taste and enjoyment. Self Studio was asked to develop a whole new brand for this ambitious value proposition, including a distinct positioning, name, visual identity, and a website where customers could create their own bespoke vegan meal plans based on their nutritional requirements.
Approach
In close partnership with the client’s team, we embarked on a discovery phase of competitor research, audience expectations and sector insights. This established the importance of nutritional science in successful vegan diets, and uncovered key trends common to fitness and lifestyle offerings around health and wellbeing. Crucially, we found that younger audiences actively interested in a vegan diet are turned off by the seriousness and sometimes self-righteous tone associated with vegan diets.
Meet Holy
We developed a strategic positioning to unite the strong scientific message with a joyful irreverence that would cut through with existing and new vegan audiences. Balancing the inherent idealism of veganism with a touch of confident self-awareness, Holy can both stand for nutritional science, and believe nutrition is sacred. Once we landed the brand name, it informed our direction on language and visual identity, opening rich creative tensions between the sacred, the scientific and the playful, both visually and verbally.
Platform
The challenge was to create a system that would automatically generate bespoke meal plans based on the user's individual health needs and fitness goals. The platform also provides a powerful back-office for the Holy team to manage the website, the meal plans, the kitchens and deliveries with a custom CRM and a production schedule system.
First fruits of labour
With meticulous analytical work, great project management and high profile team of designers & engineers, we managed to launch an MVP in two months and a half from the first brief to a first operational version of the product. We then developed the platform into a full product with more than 5 new features released weekly.
