Maine lobster from the sea to your door

Cousins Maine Lobster is one of the biggest restaurant success stories in the past decade with 40+ restaurants and food trucks nationwide. They needed a partner that could not only reimagine their digital appearance, but navigate the complexities that had previously shut down past attempts at direct to consumer eCommerce.

We built a high performance headless website that combined both the restaurant and eCommerce components into a unified website. Our strategic solutions resulted in higher customer engagement with physical locations as well as made direct to consumer sales possible resulting in millions of dollars in new revenue.

As with all redesigns, our first crucial task was to define the art direction. While Cousins Maine Lobster had branding in place and had invested time in developing out their physical presence (ie. menus, food packaging), their existing digital presence was very basic.

The eventual art direction we landed on really brings out the character of the brand though use of thoughtful accents and dynamic layouts. It needed to feel rich in content, while remaining clean + modern, easy to navigate and an extension of the brand's existing physical presence.

Our goal for the portion of the site focused on Cousins' physical presence was to make it easier for customers to engage with the brand. Given that food trucks are always on the move, we wanted to reimagine the discovery process into a more customer centric solution.

We felt the best way to do this would be to allow customers to enter their zip code and in return receive recommendations on which locations would be having events in their area that week. It was not an easy feat to accomplish given that food trucks had multiple events per day and customers could live in any zipcode in the USA - ultimately this turned out to be a much more user friendly experience and resulted in higher conversions to food + restaurant pages.

Our biggest accomplishment of this project was in building a sophisticated custom checkout that made possible their multimillion dollar direct to consumer business.

Live lobster needs to be delivered door-to-door in 24 hours otherwise all is lost. This means that delivery dates presented to customers and ship dates had to be 100% accurately integrated with actual UPS pickup + overnight delivery. If estimates were off, this would result in possibly hundreds of dollars lost per order and would essentially crush the possibilities of this sales channel all together.