Real jerky.

Dick Duffs was launching as a startup with no digital presence, no brand identity, and no logo. Every customer they had at that point came from word of mouth around the founder's kitchen and a circle of friends and family. To enter the market they needed a complete brand from scratch, a package that could compete on shelf, and an ecommerce storefront that could take orders from day one. The plan was to sell primarily online at the start, so the website was not a marketing brochure, it was the actual storefront.

The category was already crowded. There were dozens of jerky brands in Canada and the United States competing on packaging, with many of them defaulting to a kraft paper aesthetic and a generic outdoor logo. The brand had to feel rooted in the real outdoor story of the founders without becoming a parody of it, and the package had to give a customer a reason to pick it up over a familiar incumbent. The risk of falling into a generic outdoor look was real, and avoiding it required a sharper visual point of view than the category default.

There was also no analytics history to design from. With an established business I would normally study traffic and shopping behaviour to inform site structure and product page design. Dick Duffs was a true blank slate, so the discovery work, the wireframes, and the conversion strategy had to lean on category research and the founders' direct knowledge of their customer rather than on past data. That is a position of trust, and it required earning the founders' confidence early in the project so the deeper creative decisions later in the process did not stall.

Dick Duffs launched with a complete brand system: a rustic compass logo, window-front packaging that showed the product, a custom WordPress and WooCommerce ecommerce site, and an outdoor photography library run through a consistent filter system. The launch took a soft-launch approach, with a few quiet days on the production server to verify caching and performance before the public announcement. Once the technical checks were clean, the public launch went out and the storefront started taking orders directly.

Jeremy summed up the partnership in his testimonial: "Nick takes time to identify a unique brand personality and needs instead of presenting general solutions. Nick actively collaborates and even challenges our ideas if it means creating a better end product." That kind of working relationship was what allowed the rugged, hand-crafted character of the brand to land so cleanly across the package, the site, and the marketing. The brand never felt focus-grouped because the founders were inside the creative conversation, not waiting for slides at the end.

The site has continued to serve as the storefront for the brand and the home for the family-recipe story that started the business. The investment in technical and on-page search optimization at launch gave Dick Duffs a credible position in organic search even as a brand-new operation, and the founders were trained on the publishing workflow so they could keep adding new products and content without coming back to me for every change.