Case Study
Chef Works
How this culinary apparel company tripled their revenue and grew their audience by 4,000%
Chef Works is a leader in the culinary apparel industry. Worn by some of the world’s most renowned chefs, including Jet Tila, Carla Hall, and Dominique Crenn, and by global enterprise clientele. Chef Works garments have become more than a uniform — they’re also a rite of passage.
When I joined the team in 2012, Chef Works was already a multi-million dollar company. However, they needed a plan for continued growth, brand transformation and diversification.
With the world evolving and the industry shifting, the company’s leadership knew they needed a strategic foundation in order to springboard their business into future sustainability and profitability.
As the business changed, my leadership roles expanded. Here’s what I was able to achieve during my time at Chef Works in the three progressive positions I held; (1) Chef Works Client Services and Program Manager, Manager; then the (2) Director of Marketing; and finally the (3) Vice President of Marketing.
Drove social audience growth from 12k to 550k
The Results
Secured multi-year, multi-million strategic partner contracts
Lifted Revenue 3x
In the following sections, I outline the exact methodology I used to achieve these results. It’s part of the same signature system I apply with all of my clients: a unique, three-pronged approach focused on integrating strategy, marketing, and culture.
Each business needs three core elements to operate effeciently and thrive. After two decades in leadership roles, marketing, and strategic planning, I’ve observed that businesses start to stutter when these three elements are disjointed and not in cohesion with each other in an orchestrated ecosystem.
Strategy
As a forward-facing company, Chef Works was looking for a clear path to sustainable growth. They knew they wanted to expand in the E-commerce realm, leverage existing partnerships and contracts, and they also knew it was time to diversify their business. But first, they needed a strategy.
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What exactly is a strategy? Here at ETH3NA, we define a strategy as the framework for where you want to go and who you want to be. Creating a solid, yet agile strategy involves refining your vision and assessing the competitive landscape. It’s a crucial step to sustainable growth, and it can be challenging to know where to start.
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Many businesses either don’t have a strategy, don’t have a long-term strategy, or don’t know how to appropriately implement their strategy.
The action plan
I began by doing what I do best: active listening and active learning.Â
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I participated in stakeholder meetings, then interviewed every stakeholder at every level about their unique vision. Once I synthesized the information, I built a strategy with a corresponding timeline. This powerful and comprehensive strategy mapped out the future roadmap Chef Works was looking for, complete with phases for performance review and evaluation in order to make pivots as needed so that the plan could be as organic and responsive as it was smart and calculated.
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Together, with the president of Chef Works, we preemptively put it through a stress test: Does it have holes? Are there any potential fractures where it could fall apart? Is it still valid after we’ve input all of the relevant data? Taking the necessary time to do our due diligence to ensure we had a sound strategy on our hands.
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By the end of the preliminary planning phase the company had a 3-5 year strategic business plan that not only gained approval and funding, but also served as a sounding board to validate new ideas. Thanks to the long-term strategy, Chef Works had the freedom to be as creative as they wanted with strategic guardrails that allowed them to test new ideas, see if they aligned with their long-term goals with minimal risk, and decide which were worth pursuing given current circumstances and outcomes.
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In summary, the strategy gave them clarity.
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Together, we achieved 80% of the goals we had laid out in that strategy, helping the company grow to where they are today and to establish the foundational platform for them to progress even further.
Marketing
Chef Works was recognized in the culinary apparel industry — but only within a specific demographic. They needed help elevating their marketing approach to create broader brand recognition for consumers and enterprise businesses, establish the brand as an icon, and to innovate within a cutting-edge digital space. The world was evolving, the hospitality industry was changing, and Chef Works needed to reimagine a new way forward and reconnect with its core audience.
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My assessment led to three challenges:
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There was no proactive marketing strategy. The marketing department served as a request-only team, meaning they created materials only when the sales or product development teams needed support.
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Social and email marketing did not existent. Despite its prominence among chefs and other hospitality workers, the brand wasn’t active on social media and, consequently, was missing out on an opportunity to engage with a new generation of customers and prospects. Additionally, Chef Works wasn’t leveraging email marketing which is a lucrative channel for B2B.
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The customer landscape was changing. There was a disconnect between the previous idea of what a classic chef should be versus what the chefs out in the real world actually were. It was clear that Chef Works needed to realign, reengage, and reconnect with its end-user.
The action plan
One of the first elements of my marketing strategy was to talk to the end-user. I personally attended various sponsored events and tagged along sales trips to interact with the people who were purchasing and wearing Chef Works garments. I found that the chef’s opinion held a lion's share of the purchasing decision power, even more than the corporate entities we’d been primarily focusing on, and that we needed to readjust our approach and connect to them.
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FLASHBACK STORY: In 2015, I was spearheading the deign and development of the Chef Works catalog, and I decided to put a male chef who had fully-tattooed sleeves on the front cover. Prior culinary aesthetics were called “blacks and whites,” which meant a white jacket, black pants, and a white hat. No visible piercings, no jewelry, no tattoos - this washow a profesional chef was portrayed in prior years. The actual culinary industry is a haven for non-traditional iconoclasts, passionate influencers, and true innovators.
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There will always be a section of the industry that prefers that clean, crisp look; however the world of chefs was evolving — instead of being behind the trends, we began to join them and eventually co-create with them.
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The result? The year this catalog went to print was the year Chef Works grew exponentially in revenue. To this day, the brand collection we designed, developed and launched in 2015, the Urban Collection®, is the largest revenue producing sub-brand amongst all Chef Works product categories.
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The catalog was just one piece of the marketing puzzle. The company’s social media strategy was the next hurdle, which included influencer marketing, brand collaborations and I hired and managed a compact social media team who actively participated in all things social. Chef Works social media following grew from 12k to 550k — a growth rate of over 4,000%.
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By driving brand awareness and equity through channels such as social media, email marketing, repositioning the brand and brand voice, Chef Works was also able to secure the attention of major partnership players that manifested into multi-million, multi-year strategic contracts, still active to this day.
Culture
Culture is the most valuable resource any organization has. It’s also the most costly. Chef Works had been making incremental positive changes over the years — however they were short term boosts that many companies often experience. When businesses try to implement changes and aren’t finding sticky success, it’s common for negativity to spread among employees. There’s a sense of frustration and limitation, loss of power and participation, that spreads across the organization, negatively infecting company culture.
The action plan
My initial position in customer service as the Customer Service and Program Manager, Manager, proved to be the best learning ground to understand how deep and ingrained the culture had become. I sat with 10 people on my team in the customer service group for two weeks straight. And I simply asked genuine questions.
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Do you get this pop-up message every time you input an order? Is this normal? Do you have to do this every single time? Would it be better if you didn’t have to click this button? What would that mean to your work day and how you feel at the end of the day?
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The employees helped me paint a picture of their ideal work environment — what would help them do their job, what would contribute to a better working environment, and this inclusive approach showed the employees that I cared. Because I did care. All businesses should care. That's a crucial point of creating company culture. You don’t care - they will know and act accordingly.
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I took the time to learn how to do everything that everybody was doing: how to place orders, how to find customer accounts, how to process a return, etc. Instead of sitting in my office, I’d sit with the rest of the team and do the work alongside them. The employees learned that this was the behavior a leader should display. Instead of giving orders and following up, active participation and honest engagement began to shift the previously learned poor behaviors within the businesses walls, resetting expectations.
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This ultimately shifted the mindset of most. Watching as the culture and the mood started to shift organically. The leadership recognized me as someone who was with the people, doing the work. Eventually, the teams didn’t need me, which was the ultimate goal, empowering them to drive consistent change that ultimately helped them do their work better, faster, and more efficiently. The team naturally evolved into a self-sufficient, independent team that held each other accountable which had a ripple effect on the entire company culture.
Key Takeaways For Your Business
Your next level of business growth is possible. You just need a plan to get there. When you work with ETH3NA Creative, you immediately benefit from a signature system and decades of expertise that combines strategy, marketing, and culture to build a sustainable growth plan with positive, long-term impact on your bottom line.
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*No actuals will be shared due to the fact that Chef Works is a privately held company. Huge thanks to Neil Gross and Josh Gross for giving me permission to paint the amazing journey we enjoyed together during my unforgettable tenure at Chef Works. I wish them nothing but fortune and favor in all the years to come.