Retention is critical for scale, and in the direct-to-consumer landscape, it’s an ongoing challenge. Our latest work with healthy personal grocery brand Hungryroot was an immersive dive back into a relationship that began at its launch. We collaborated with the company’s product and marketing teams to define the end-to-end customer experience—with the goal of making Hungryroot a long-term habit. The new brand leverages individual preferences and smart technology to become part personal shopper, part sous chef, delivering weekly healthy groceries curated to the customer’s needs, tastes, and habits.
Strategy
Engagement never ends.
The customer journey is never a straight line. For subscription-based brands, the journey is a constant cycle to keep the customer engaged. Each cycle also creates opportunities for the brand to improve, connect and build loyalty.
Solution
Healthy is personal.
The new Hungryroot is more than a shift from meal kit to groceries; it's a digital-first collaboration between the brand and its customers. We examined modern life habits and pain points around healthy eating—whether solo or sharing—to find opportunities for Hungryroot to differentiate and connect. Research led to brand positioning as a personalized healthy grocery service and an end-to-end customer experience designed to engage the customer, learn from them, and evolve food choices to stay exciting. Each customer's relationship with Hungryroot, like their relationship to food, is truly personal.
Build a roadmap to retention, collaboratively.
We took an agile, collaborative approach with the in-house product and content teams, to work through ideas and align on strategies. Weekly "big table" meetings and smaller group workshops allowed us to collectively weigh opportunities in the end-to-end journey for ROI and design and test accordingly.
Our weekly meetings and workshops felt extremely smart and productive. The way we started from the highest level and worked down to the most granular questions helped everyone in the room feel tightly aligned and excited. Working together felt organic and seamless—like we’re part of the same brand/company.
Kara Freewind,
Director of Brand, Hungryroot
Design for delight.
This customer lives mobile-first. In one click, they arrive on-site, where messaging leads with value to them and aspires to delight through copy, illustration, and animated UX moments. The onboarding flow is designed to quickly answer questions before they arise while gathering personal information for the best first experience.
Celebrate choice.
Setting a clear expectation and value from the start is essential for retention. Previous customer feedback revealed that perceptions of choice and variety—or more importantly, the food boredom that results from their absence—was a key reason for cancelling or pausing subscriptions. Introducing like-minded, modern third-party food brands, exposing more products before signing up, and contextualizing the ease of cooking with them reveals the value of the products beneath the layer of service.
Make control easy.
The customer dashboard is designed to create a self-improving loop in the product experience. Customer engagement—rating foods, tracking deliveries, customizing grocery lists, and shopping by recipes—directly supports the AI optimizing the week’s food. This balance of service and control ultimately leads to a delightfully personalized healthy habit.
We’re creating a new category in the direct-to-consumer space by bridging the gap between the broken in-store and online grocery experience, with an added emphasis on personalization.
Ben McKean,
CEO & Founder, Hungryroot
Results
Brand resilience
Scope
- Stakeholder Interviews & Workshops
- Audience & Landscape Research
- Persona Development
- Brand Audit
- Insights & Positioning
- Naming, Voice & Messaging
- Identity System (initial launch)
- Art Direction
- User Experience
- Web & Mobile Design
- Motion Graphics & Animation
Team
- Sarah Asip, System Design & Research
- Jenn Cash, Principal, UX Strategy & Creative Direction
- Jesse Lankford, UX and Visual Design
- Jenna Park, Creative Strategy & Visual Design
- Tanya Quick, Principal, Brand Strategy & Creative Direction
- Rachel Shim, Motion Design & Research
- Niquita Taliaferro, UX & Visual Design
- Jada Vogt, Art Direction & Visual Design
- Frank Wild, Studio Assistant
Collaborators
- Hungryroot Brand, Marketing and Product Teams
- Hargreaves and Levin, Campaign Photography