Homestyle Direct

We built and designed a website with an e-commerce meal shopping and ordering experience, a multi-level case manager referral form process and integrated it with the company’s CRM system.

Problem

Homestyle Direct recognized the need to evolve its brand to better align with its growing offerings and changing market dynamics—the company had grown from a meal delivery service for food insecurity into a comprehensive healthcare company offering home-delivered meals to Medicaid Advantage and Medicare members.

The existing brand identity was 26 years old and no longer fully represented the company's full offering, necessitating a comprehensive rebranding. The challenge was to develop new messaging and a visual identity that positioned Homestyle Direct as a healthcare company with many meal choices and meals that were medically tailored to specific disease states - heart disease, renal disease, diabetes, gluten intolerance and other chronic conditions. Additionally, the rebranding had to be implemented across all platforms, including an outdated e-commerce website, to ensure a cohesive and seamless experience for multiple audiences: elderly, adult children, healthcare case managers, state agencies and healthcare companies.

Solution

The initial step involved comprehensive market research to understand industry trends, customer needs, and the competitive landscape. This research laid the foundation for developing a messaging strategy that would resonate with the target audience. The key focus was to hone in on the messaging that accurately reflected the brand's values and offerings. Alongside the messaging refinement, a new visual identity was developed and launched. The visual identity comprised a new logo, colors, supporting graphical elements, iconography, font packages and photography style. Once approved and trademarked, we updated the website design, all social media channels, and email templates to reflect the new brand image and messaging. This also included programming a new e-commerce website (not only frontend design), fully designed to meet the needs of multiple audiences, including a shop for meals, referral forms for case managers and information for state agencies and partners. To ensure effective implementation, training and communication were provided to the internal team on how to use the messaging toolkit and all new sales collateral effectively. This step was crucial to maintaining a unified brand voice across all departments and platforms. Included in the training was lots of new swag given out to employees, including puffer jackets, hoodies, stickers, pens, and more! The final step was launching a comprehensive marketing campaign targeting Case Managers, and also the company’s database of current members. The invigorated communications were sent consistently and frequently to both case managers and the existing members. We leveraged Homestyle Direct’s social media channels, CRM databases, and national press releases to communicate new medically-tailored meals, updated menus, and the variety the company provided for its members.

Impact

Here's the exciting part: We met the challenge and exceeded it! Meal orders skyrocketed by an impressive 87% year-over-year, and we grew their customer base by 32% after the first marketing campaign post-rebrand. Now after 2-years, revenue grew from $40M to $60M due to the re-branding, new marketing efforts, strong sales team and stronger operations overall.