My Muscle Chef

My muscle Chef

When the folks at My Muscle Chef visited my team at Chello, their brand was all about health, freshness and ease. Sounds reasonable for a food company, right? And so their brand featured bright colours, a twee voice and a ‘Chef’ character.

The people behind the purchase

With some killer research we found qualitative and quantitative insights about My Muscle Chef’s customers. Time-poor, fitness obsessed and willing to prioritise their fitness over, say, their family. The people who relied on these meals were fixed in their eating and exercise. And the people who loved the product really, really loved it. (One customer brought a My Muscle Chef meal to a wedding reception...)

More than half of their revenue came from a fraction of customers making repeat orders.

They were also, unsurprisingly, an image-conscious group. This seemed to extend to the packaging of the meals. A few customers mentioned that they were a little embarrassed when their orders would show up at work. They weren’t feeling the Chef plastered on the side. Were his days numbered?

From food to fuel

The product was speaking for itself. But quality, convenience and variety was the minimum standard of the category. Word of mouth would do more than us telling people a meal tasted good.

My Muscle Chef could step up by being a product built for performance; focussing on strength and not the broader, fuzzier idea of ‘being healthy’.

We imagined the product as critical infrastructure for upholding a routine. This was fuel, not just food.

The talk to fit the walk

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With all that insight, I had the terrific fun of designing a verbal identity. It needed to be powerful, a little bit serious, deliberate and motivational. We wanted to be closer to a personal trainer than a chef.

This voice could flex a strong turn of phrase, but was never twee or cute. Most importantly it needed to be empowering, not patronising.

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I took inspiration from sportswear brands rather than food brands, using an confident lexicon and short, striking sentence structures to speak to customer goals.

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I too am annoyed by the lack of full stop at the end of the second sentence

At the same time, the graphic design team got to work. They nixed the Chef to bring more gravitas to the brand.

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The finish line

To help launch the brand, I wrote the initial copy for the website and a series of ‘transition’ eDMs to bridge the old and new brand.

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My Muscle Chef saw a 27% increase in sales within the first two months of their rebrand. They’re on track to turn the previous year’s $19 million in revenue into $150 million. And they’ve scored some big investment along the way.

So they’re doing alright.