The Project: Olive Branch Culinary Services New Branding and Website Design + Build 

After 16 years in business, Olive Branch Culinary Services, a San Francisco-based professional chef service company, chose Thrive to create its new logo and to strategize, design, write and develop a brand new website. Both were unveiled and launched in early June 2024.  

The Challenge

The company’s existing logo didn’t match the elegance or elevated chef services provided by Olive Branch. Oftentimes, the imagery was confused with Olive Garden – far from ideal for a gourmet personal chef and private catering company.

Olive Branch’s existing website was built internally in Wix, was difficult to navigate, had minimal copy and did not rank on Google for impactful keywords other than its name. Not all of the site’s forms integrated seamlessly with various tools, requiring some manual CRM work.

The new website project requirements included:

• Create a website that is clean, modern and on-brand with beautiful imagery
• Ensure the site is built with UX (user experience) best practices 
• Ensure the site is SEO-friendly 
• Write compelling new copy and edit some existing copy that appeals to the target audience, explains the company’s services succinctly and is optimized for SEO
• Build forms that integrate well with the company’s CRM and other tools
• Build and integrate a shopping cart for customizable Thanksgiving meal packages (to be updated and taken live in the fall) 

The Solution

Rebranding

We started with the rebranding part of the project. At Thrive, this phase always begins with listening and learning via interactive discovery sessions with the client. For this client, it made the most sense to keep their existing name but change everything else about the logo plus create 2 versions – one with simply Olive Branch and another with the full name.

Based on a good understanding of Olive Branch’s history, services, target audience, future goals and more, we created logo concepts, reviewed with the client, gained additional feedback and fine-tuned details … and voila! 

Website Strategy, Design, SEO, Copywriting, Photo Selection, UX, Development, Integration and Testing

As part of the rebranding process, we also determined brand colors, typography and other visual elements and guidelines, including photography aesthetics. These were all used to create a website moodboard then the site layout and design.

SEO research and copywriting were done hand-in-hand plus on-page SEO work. 

Beautiful, gourmet food photography was a key part of the site’s storytelling and branding strategy, and we took great care in selecting the photos used on the site.

The Results: New Branding + Website Design and Build

The website traffic in the first month after go-live was already higher than the previous site’s traffic for the first 6 months of 2024. Notably, Google search traffic and visits to the company’s Get Started page is trending up. SEO results take time, and we anticipate a significant increase in visitors and leads this fall for Olive Branch.