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Secret Aardvark

How might Secret Aardvark, an artisan hot sauce company, increase its sales in Seattle?  To answer this question, I collaborated with another designer to design and illustrate for a mini campaign targeting a core audience segment: the farmer’s market shopper.

Categories:
 Branding,
Illustration,
Advertising
Tools: Procreate,
Adobe Photoshop Roles: Graphic Designer,
Illustrator








Design Process

In our research on Secret Aardvark, Jacob and I learned that the business started by selling their homemade sauces out of farmer’s market stalls in Portland. Today, they are well known beyond this milieu, but they continue to herald their roots as an artisan, local seller. We based our decision to target the Seattle farmers’ market shopper on this insight.

How could we then successfully reach this audience? We decided to center our campaign around the humble tote bag giveaway. We reasoned that doing so would appeal to the utilitarian sensibilities of our audience and make sense in context at a farmer’s market.

The turning point in the design process was when we discovered that there would be a hot-sauce-sized pocket on the tote bag that would be printed on, with an illustration of the Secret Aardvark bottle.

As a functional shopping bag given away at the farmer’s market, the tote becomes a walking advertisement. Additionally, the hand-crafted nature of the illustration would make it likely that our down-to-earth audience would connect emotionally to the object.

Selected Process Images
In the concept board stage, we had not yet figured out that we were going to give away a tote bag at the farmer’s market.
Concepting continued, Jacob and I considered many directions to identify a successful strategy.
In this sketch is evident how we explored the connection between the “foodie” and “outdoorsy” characteristics of Secret Aardvark consumers. We were on the path to identifying the farmer’s market shopper as our keystone user.
Here we considered having a performance aspect of the campaign.
After deciding on the tote bag giveaway as our je ne sais quoi for the campaign, I explored directions for the printed graphic.
More illustration explorations.
A concept map for the giveaway strategy for the merch.


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