Over the previous five years, CHEF’STORE had undergone multiple name changes and rebrands. While each transition reflected the evolution of the business, the cumulative effect weakened brand continuity and created uncertainty around what CHEF’STORE was, what it offered and who could shop there.

The challenge extended beyond general awareness. The brand needed to reintroduce itself in a way that could build familiarity with the CHEF’STORE name while clearly communicating the shopping experience behind it.

The campaign needed to:

• Strengthen recognition of the CHEF’STORE name

• Reestablish a clearer and more consistent brand identity

• Explain what customers could find inside

• Clarify that the store served operators and everyday shoppers

• Address uncertainty around membership and access

• Create a repeatable awareness platform for future campaigns

From limited brand understanding to broader awareness through product discovery.

I translated a broad need for summer awareness into a defined campaign platform with a clear strategic role, audience promise and creative structure.

Responsibilities included:

• Defining the strategic purpose of the campaign

• Developing the What’s in Store? platform and messaging direction

• Establishing the balance between operator relevance and public accessibility

• Building the messaging hierarchy across products, audiences and brand differentiators

• Directing how the platform would extend across video, social and digital channels

• Guiding creative development and maintaining consistency across executions

• Connecting the campaign to broader brand and business priorities

Curiosity as the entry point: Rather than beginning with a promotion or dense explanation of the business, the campaign began with a simple question: What’s in Store? The question created an invitation to discover the brand while allowing each execution to provide a different answer through products, departments, customers or shopping occasions.

Product discovery as brand storytelling: The campaign used the assortment itself to explain CHEF’STORE. Recognizable products and departments gave audiences an immediate understanding of the business while unexpected finds created a reason to keep exploring.

Broad accessibility without losing operator credibility: The creative needed to welcome everyday shoppers without making CHEF’STORE feel less relevant to professional foodservice customers. Messaging and imagery therefore reflected multiple kinds of kitchens and shopping needs while retaining the scale, quality and utility operators expect.

Removing barriers without making them the entire story: Messages such as Open to Everyone and No Membership Required helped remove common points of confusion, but they remained supporting proof rather than becoming the entire campaign platform.

Awareness before conversion: Because the campaign’s role was top-of-funnel, success depended first on improving familiarity, understanding and consideration. The work was designed to create a larger and better-informed audience that subsequent value and conversion campaigns could build upon.

What’s in Store? turned a broad awareness objective into a repeatable discovery platform that helped make CHEF’STORE easier to understand, more approachable to new audiences and more consistent across channels.

Strategic impact: What’s in Store? gave CHEF’STORE a flexible awareness platform capable of introducing the brand through products, departments, customer needs and seasonal occasions. It created a clearer way to communicate the breadth and accessibility of the business without reducing the brand to a promotion or single customer segment.

Brand impact: The campaign helped establish a more approachable expression of CHEF’STORE while maintaining the operator credibility central to the brand.

Creative impact: The platform created a repeatable structure that could extend across TV, radio, paid social, digital advertising and owned channels while allowing each execution to tell a distinct discovery story.

• Impressions: 38.3M (+52%)

• Engagements: 5.2M (+149%)

• Video views: 7M (+66%)

• Engagement Rate: 3.5% (+40%)

• Clicks: 1.14M (+74%)

• Comments: +108%

• Shares: +254%

• Reactions: +265%

• CTR: 3%

• Audience Growth: +71%

Reporting: 5/1/25-12/31/25