Tabanero makes hot sauce, and for about a year I made every piece of it that a customer saw. I designed the labels on the bottles, wrote the posts and the emails, developed the recipes on the site, and shot the photography under all of it. Most consumer brands split that work across several people.
The labels
Packaging is the least forgiving thing a brand does. A post can be deleted and a landing page can be edited, but a label goes to print, then onto tens of thousands of bottles, then onto a shelf next to competitors who have been there for decades. The artwork went through several rounds across the line of sauces before the final version was manufactured.
Working across the whole product line is the interesting part. Original, Extra Hot, and the agave sauce each had to be easy to find at a glance and clearly related to each other, which is a system problem more than a decoration problem.
Keeping it spicy
The content program was built around a consistent voice for the brand. It leaned on food holidays, recipes, and the kind of jokes a hot sauce brand can make and a bank cannot. That gave the account something to say on a Tuesday in February, which is the hard part of running social for a condiment.
Recipes did most of the work. Somebody searching for a fajita recipe is not searching for hot sauce, but they will meet the brand there if the recipe is good, so the recipes went on the site as real content. Fajitas, buffalo cauliflower, a falafel burger, and a breakfast ramen all shipped that way, and each one was written to be cooked.
The Miami Heat partnership
The brand had a partnership with the Miami Heat, and ticket giveaways were how it reached people. Entries came in through tabanero.com for specific home games, so during that stretch the site was the top of a funnel that fed email. Every entrant told us which game they wanted, which is a better signal than most consumer brands get from a giveaway.
What this one taught me
Doing all of it at once is what stopped me from thinking about channels separately. When you make the label, the post, and the landing page yourself, you cannot treat them as three jobs, because a customer meets all three and reads them as one brand.