Tea Connect

One of Culture Collective’s founders — a hospitality owner I’d worked with — had an idea for a messaging app built for restaurants, and brought it to Shipyard, my creative studio, for input. What he framed as an app and a brand, we reframed as a product: a definition of what it was, who it served, and how it would reach a market. From there, the work ran through brand, UX, and launch to a working alpha on both app stores.

The problem

Across Culture Collective’s restaurants, staff were managing guest communication across Instagram DMs, email, and phone, with several people touching the same conversations. Responses lagged and the voice drifted. The founders wanted something built for how a restaurant actually runs — a coordinated inbox, not another general-purpose messaging tool.

And they were about to put their own name on it in a business that runs on credibility. Launching something that looked half-built wasn’t an option.

The work

The request started from an owner’s instinct, not a spec, so the first real work was widening it. There was no product underneath the idea yet — no defined users, no boundaries on what a first version should be — and designing an interface for an undefined product would have produced a handsome dead end. So we defined the product first: who it was for, what it needed to do, and where the first release should stop. That definition is what made the brand and the interface buildable.

Brand and product then ran in parallel rather than in sequence, so the identity and the interface shaped each other instead of one waiting on the other. We sourced and directed a copywriting team for the brand voice, brought in UX testing against the flows, and coordinated a remote development team through the build — all on a design system built to carry iteration.

Where it landed

A loose “build us an app” became a scoped product, a complete brand system, eight app screens, and a go-to-market program a team could execute. We shipped a working alpha to the iOS and Android stores, with a launch site and a coherent product story behind it, and put it in front of restaurants.

The deliverable was never a logo — it was a product someone could run with.

Scope

Client

Culture Collective

Studio

Shipyard

Role

Principal, creative director, designer

Year

2022–2023

Engagement

Multi-month brand & product build

Disciplines

Brand strategy · Product definition · UI/UX · Design systems · Go-to-market

Team

Sourced & directed copywriting, UX testing, remote development