Tabanero makes hot sauce, and for about a year I made everything the brand put in front of a customer. The bottles on the shelf, the posts, the emails, the recipes on the site and the photography under all of it came out of the same pair of hands, which is not how most consumer brands run and is exactly why I still point at this one.
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. Artwork went through rounds against the line of sauces, and the last round was the one that got manufactured.
Working across the whole product line rather than a single bottle is what makes it interesting. Original, Extra Hot and the agave sauce each needed to be findable at a glance and obviously related to each other, and that is a system problem more than a decoration problem.
Keeping it spicy
Social ran under one idea rather than a posting schedule. The content program was built around a running voice for the brand, and it leaned on food holidays, recipes and the kind of jokes a hot sauce brand can make and a bank cannot. It gave the account something to say on a Tuesday in February, which is the actual hard part of running social for a condiment.
Recipes did the heavy lifting. Somebody searching for a fajita recipe is not searching for hot sauce, but they will meet the brand there if the recipe is genuinely good, so the recipes went on the site as real content rather than as bottle placements. Fajitas and buffalo cauliflower and a falafel burger and a breakfast ramen all shipped that way, each one written to be cooked rather than skimmed.
The Miami Heat partnership
The brand ran a partnership with the Miami Heat, and ticket giveaways were how it reached people. Entries came in through tabanero.com against specific home games, so the site was not a brochure in that stretch. It was the top of a funnel that fed email, and every entrant arrived already telling us which game they wanted, which is a better signal than most consumer brands ever get from a giveaway.
What this one taught me
Doing all of it at once is what broke me of thinking about channels separately. When you make the label and the post and the landing page yourself, it stops being possible to treat them as three jobs, because a customer meets all three and reads them as one brand. Every campaign I have planned since starts from that.