Social House Eatery and Cafe located in Philadelphia’s historic South Street District had big shoes to fill taking over the space of former La.Va Cafe, the neighborhood’s iconic coffee shop.
Rory Walsh and his best friend Danielle purchased La.Va Cafe with big dreams. They wanted a fresh look for the new brand to mark a new generation of coffee shop owner connoisseurs, while maintaining the spirit of La.Va Cafe’s social atmosphere: South Street’s favorite living room.
Social House Eatery and Cafe’s brand transformation is a journey that every entrepreneur and business owner must own. It is not as simple as picking a name, creating a new logo and or a new website. It is an all encompassing journey that demands a thoughtful creative and operational process in ways that will respect the old and welcome the new.
GoGoGuest designed our brand, website, runs and manages our business WiFi service, and is our customer data and marketing partner. With GoGoGuest on our side, we’re able to focus 200% on running our business. – Rory Walsh, co-Founder
Social House Cafe & Eatery, A Re-Branding Story
Every entrepreneur and business owner is aware that starting and running a retail business is a big commitment of time and resources.
Rory Walsh, the co-Founder of Social House Cafe & Eatery new that “how you want your customers to experience your business will shape his success in taking over South Street’s favorite and iconic coffee house, the former La.Va Cafe.
The challenge. Creating a customer experience that respects the old, while bringing in the new asks for a delicate balance and respect. Rory needed a partner who understood his creative vision while providing him with operational and infrastructure support. These were the key challenge areas:
- A new brand system (logo font, logo icon, fonts, color palette)
- Business WiFi service capable of time-limit controls associated with a purchase
- Digital marketing partner to design, build and maintain the brand’s website and digital presence
The solution. With over 20 years of experience in digital marketing and building product technology, the team at sGoGoGuest worked along-side Rory and Danielle to deliver, implement and run all aspects of a new brand system, business WiFi service and digital marketing for their new coffee shop, Social House Cafe & Eatery.
This is how GoGoGuest helped.
Brand system design. The visual aesthetics of creating design is a very subjective process. It needs to feel right to the stakeholder.
As part of our internal design process at GoGoGuest, we go through an extensive discovery phase to minimize errors in the lifecycle of the project. Our design process is not limited to colors, aesthetics and pixels. Our design approach is holistic, taking into account the overall creative and technical strategy needed to build a great system and customer experience.
Business WiFi service. Rory and Danielle’s vision for Social House Cafe and Eatery stems from their prior work in hospitality and brands. They wanted to create a space for creators to build upon on their ideas.
This meant providing comfortable chairs and tables conducive for thinking, as well as a reliable fast and high performing access to WiFi. They also needed an automated way to manage guests without constantly reminding them about a purchase or selling WiFi access as a product or service. Rory and Danielle saw the value in our one-click integration with Square that allows a coffee shop to require a purchase before connecting to the Internet.
It is the only solution we’ve found that offers a great guest experience and is frictionless on our operational flow. This solution prepares us well, as the future of remote work turn into a norm for many large technology organizations. – Rory
Digital marketing. Overall digital marketing falls behind on the to do lists for busy retail entrepreneurs and business owners. To make this a simple and streamlined, Rory leaned on GoGoGuest to design and develop a scalable and flexible website that gives the brand flexibility to adapt to changes and experiment on new workflows without the need to fully overhaul their website.
About GoGoGuest
GoGoGuest is a customer marketing and data software subscription solution that helps every business and iconic brand better understand their customers. We are trusted by over 200 businesses and power more than a million customer engagements every month. Our story.
