The Food of Love, and why we keep saying yes to Stratford.
Some wins deserve a small announcement. The Food of Love is a cafe on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, run by a Greek couple we liked within five minutes of meeting them, with twenty years of goodwill behind a front door that no longer does it justice. Over the next few months we are rebuilding their brand from the shopfront in. It is also, rather neatly, everything our last piece argued for, happening in practice.
A few weeks ago we wrote about backing the businesses down the road. This is what that looks like when it stops being an argument and becomes a client. The Food of Love is a cafe on Henley Street run by a Greek couple whose warmth you notice before you notice anything else. Twenty years of regulars, a name that nods to Twelfth Night (exactly the right amount of Shakespeare for this town), and a brand that has never been given the attention the place itself earns daily.
They found us the way people find things now: a Google search, then our work for Loxleys a few streets from their own door, then the detail that sealed it, that we are local. No tender, no pitch deck. Dinner in September, a conversation about what they are building, a proposal they could read in one sitting, and a yes.
What we are doing
We are partnering with them to transform the brand end to end: a new identity, and with it the whole experience of the place, physical and digital. The shopfront and the room on one side; the website and everything that makes them findable on the other.
The order is the point: identity first, the physical experience timed around their October close so the new brand arrives with the freshly painted room, and digital last, because a website is a window onto the room and the room has to be worth looking at first.
A cafe announces itself from the pavement, so that is where we start.
The local thread
This is our second Stratford hospitality brand. The first was Loxleys, the independent restaurant and wine bar a few minutes from the studio, where we refreshed the brand and rebuilt the website so the welcome online finally matched the one in the room. That work did the selling here: it is what The Food of Love found when they went looking, a short walk from their own front door. There is a quiet lesson in that for us too, because being findable in your own town is a choice you make long before anyone searches. The pattern holds here as well: the work is minutes from the studio, we will eat in the room we design, and the feedback loop is a walk rather than a video call. Everything we said about proximity being a working advantage gets tested in public here, under a sign we drew, which is precisely the kind of accountability we think design studios should be signing up for.
If you run a business within reach of Stratford-upon-Avon and some of this sounds like the kind of help you want, start a conversation. And when The Food of Love reopens under the new identity, we will show the work, and you should go for the food.
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