Wowza!

Joshy Jin and his kitchen team have worked in top end restaurants for many years. During this time, he developed procedures that enable top restaurant qualities to be recreated in a home kitchen environment.

They strictly follow the restaurant procedure, preparing the dishes in their kitchen, leaving box subscribers to do as little as possible so the team is in control of the quality.

We created a new vibrant brand – ‘Wowza! box’; a mixture of both traditional and modern designs.

With the Wowza! identity, we had to balance the creativity from the bold flavours with the quality of the actual food. This led us to a sophisticated yet playful responsive identity system that hints at the ‘box’ nature of the product in a visually interesting way. The team at Wowza! Also wanted to be able to play a little with the identity, and not take themselves too seriously, this led to Wowza! ‘W!’ Mark and the exclamation roundel, which is used in brand communications and social posts.

The colour palette is a mixture of the very traditional Chinese restaurant colours of creams and blacks, with a very cheeky pink accent colour. While Wowza!’s launch strategy is mainly focused on the Chinese consumers here in the UK, we see this pink colour coming into play more and more as the brand gains recognition and moves into its vegan and vegetarian specific markets.

Typography was a big part of this branding project. An equal fusion of culture and authenticity was brought to the designs as we really wanted to integrate both Latin and Chinese characters. This was something that the team really rose to as a challenge, and we think the results speak for themselves. The idea is to not have to create materials or even the website, where you have to have an English version or a Chinese version. No matter which is your primary language, you can read the information as it is presented. This again also helps lend the feeling of authenticity to the UK market, and food explorers who are looking for genuine East Asian cuisine.

Bold and exciting imagery is something we wanted the brand to adopt. Its focus should be on the great food as a finished cooked meal and the excitement and joy it brings to those who get to eat it. Even cooking it as a process is a fun and simple experience that makes you feel like a top chef.

We collaborated with Third Aspect who we would like to thank for providing the fantastic food imagery that really helped to get across the authenticity and quality of the wide array of available dishes that Wowza! has to offer.

The Wowza! packaging was an important aspect to this project, as this would be the first physical experience a user would have after ordering and receiving a Wowza! box. This means it is important to ensure the packaging designs showed the brand identity and highlighted the quality of the product and experience being provided.

We wanted to ensure that the new Wowza! branding was present on every Wowza! box to establish a strong brand identity. The Wowza! team was keen to deliver a sustainable solution for the packaging of every Wowza! box delivered, resulting in careful consideration of the materials used in the packaging.

Following the establishment of a strong brand, including Colour Palettes, Typography, Logos and Imagery, we then progressed onto designing an intuitive, user-friendly website. In order to achieve this, we needed to consider the user experience and associated processes.

We held discussions with stakeholders to understand what was required. Based on our findings, the information architecture and the user journeys were defined and then wireframed. Lastly, we created a fully clickable prototype that users could interact with and test the process before further development commenced. This also made it easier for engineers to develop.

After discussions with the client it was clear that we would need to integrate the website with several third party integrations. For inventory management we had to ensure the website worked with Zoho Inventory, both from Zoho to Website and Website to Zoho. This integration was key as it’s extremely important that any dishes that were not available due to ingredients being out of stock were clearly marked as not available.

The second integration was with DPD as their chosen courier and we were able to make sure there was a seamless process for the client when it came to dispatching orders and providing tracking information to the customer.

Outside of these integrations we built the website from the ground up, instead of using a prebuilt theme – the team took on the responsibility of creating all aspects of the website from scratch. This allowed us to create multiple bespoke sections of the website whilst still allowing us to give the client easy to edit site-wide access without needing to touch any code.

The final challenge for development was taking the designed UX and implementing it into the site by means of custom filters, and the ability to schedule a delivery date for each and every order. To do this we created a bespoke account area and cart process, streamlining the ordering process for the customer along with identifying the best snippets of data for use in filters on the menu page.

Layers Studio successfully branded, designed and delivered a Website for Wowza! that provided customers the opportunity to order and schedule delivery of a wide variety of exciting cooking experiences and authentic, traditional Chinese dishes.

Through consideration and collaboration we were able to provide effective solutions to meet all of our clients requirements, resulting in a strong brand identity and an intuitive end to end process for users to follow to order Wowza! box cooking experiences and tasty dishes!