FreshDirect’s Creative Take
While working at Freshdirect, along with daily tasks such as designing sponsor banners, logo placements, collateral materials, and diverse implementations, I also got to create and think outside of the everyday boundaries. One of these occasions manifested when Jason Ackerman, founder, and CEO, asked to reinterpret the way our customers’ shop. The current site was out-of-date, had been built almost hand-stitched, and didn’t keep up to newer web technologies. After all, FreshDirect’s website was the original pioneer in online grocery shopping more than 15 years ago. Back then, the internet was barely in diapers, and I was challenged to create a new layout that better fit with today’s online shoppers: a smart, adaptive site that accommodated each of our user’s needs. But at the same time, effectively highlight the aspects on which FreshDirect thrives: locally grown, hand-picked and high-quality groceries. FreshDirect is, essentially, an online supermarket, but we needed to make it into a lifestyle. So that’s what we did.
New Home Page
The new homepage needed to show how devoted FD farmers are. Merchants and Producer Stories must run the show. The page was laid out so, the best of FD was shown right on top following a smart module that learned consumer behaviors. Then, seasonal themes and buy by mood or brand where also included on the homepage. About 9-10 versions of the homepage were designed, keeping the current, live one, as the final version.
Hallow Eats
one of the verticals I had a lot of fun designing, was the seasonal Halloween landing page. We made it Gif animated, interactive and spooky but friendly. We, photographers, copywriters, and designers, enjoy the freedom that Halloween brings to our daily routine.
Seasonal Verticals
We designed and produced a full cohesive campaign for each season. The shopper marketing team ideated several versions of the landing pages to showcase what’s good every week. Sometimes I designed, up to 10 different versions of the same campaign all of them programmed to go live each week. They even invented festivities in an effort to market products that were not too well known among consumers.
‘Stay hungry. Stay foolish.’ — Steve Jobs
Without a doubt, my favorite “holiday” is April Fool’s Day. We made it a tradition to ideate the weirdest, closest to reality ideas and try to fool our consumers in a cute way. Our first successful campaign we called “Eagle Caught Salmon”. It was believable because you know, pigs find truffles, and eagles already hunt fish. So it wasn’t too far from reality that we could train bald eagles to catch salmon for FreshDirect. That would be the most sustainable, freshest salmon you’ll ever taste. Well, a huge amount of people actually believed it, and they loved it.
As for our next joke, we read NASA discovered a new meteorite that crashed on earth, in the base of the crater, they found salt. Et voila! “Space Salt” was born. FreshDirect already sells super pure volcanic Icelandic salt, so, why not salt coming from a meteorite. The idea was so great, even a retired astronaut loved our story on Instagram.
More than Verticals
The best way to have ideas is when freedom is allowed. For an artist, a designer, a musician be able to create, flexibility is essential. I had a lot of it at FreshDirect, being the Lead Creative, allowed me to ideate and come up with silly crazy ideas that were very well received. My teammates also had a lot of creative voice, most of the occasions. The reason why we enjoyed so much working together.
The lobster party creatives were also another adventure, we even made a music rap video lead by our incredibly cool VP of Marketing, Lisa Kolodny and directed by our super-star writer Philip Emeott ( he’s the lobster on the video ). It was so successful, we made a sequel. All credit goes to the marketing team 🙂
