All The Evil Baker - Starve the Bards

Positioning

All the Evil Bakery is a business built around savouring life's great moments without guilt, about creating moments of connection over cake, confectionary and cocktails.

It's about great flavours and textures of food and drink that work together beautifully to help elevate social experiences - all the butter, all the sugar, all the gluten... all within pleasant moderation.

Bringing people together and giving restaurants and shops another lifeline.

After Covid and with the rise of AI, many people want to reconnect and socialise in person. All the Evil utilises the concept of sweet treat and cocktail pairings as an alternative for the "cheese and charcuterie" set to connect and celebrate.

Its mission is about helping people celebrate any small wins in life that are best shared with others, whether out on the town or at home. It also works with restaurants to promote and upsell two of their highest margin offerings - drinks and desserts.

The audience and competition

Target Audience.

25-55 year old women and couples
Income range: Middle to upper-middle class - enough disposable income that going out for cocktails or dessert is not a financial stretch.
Living urban, urban adjacent and suburban areas with central socialisation hubs that include sit-in restaurants that encourage linger time.
(Assumed) similar to those most likely brunch on the weekends or attend cocktail happy-hours
Secondary audience: Restaurants wanting to increase table receipts but are not under pressure to turn over tables quickly (yet)

Competition

Bars that offer happy hour cocktails, Sunday brunch restaurants, restaurant afternoon teas (UK)
People staying home to have wine and low-effort snacks
Restaurants that offer sweet treats with digestives

Core differentiation

Expert palettes providing exceptional matching

This concept is built around the alchemy of matching flavours to bring out the best of the sensuous experience of enjoying food and drink. It is not dependent on one physical or digital execution - it's about savouring food and life, then providing options for the best way to do so.

Building the brand, one recipe at a time

Before a pixel could be pushed, I spent over a year collecting, pairing and testing recipes for both cocktails and sweet treats. The concept of the business was built on the foundation of flavours and enjoyable (or at least tolerable) processes for the recipes. These pillars could help make the concept enduring and timeless.

The brand assets needed to reflect this approach. It needed to be straight forward, yet cheeky. Modern, but a nod to nostalgia. Most of all, I wanted the brand to be rich in tone, colour and texture - something cozy, something that encouraged warm, human connection.

01 The visual brand assets

The cookbook was the start but already a diverse business plan was in the works. A brand was needed.

All the Evil Bakery was a direct retort to so much negative messaging around anything with gluten, sugar, dairy, and and and... demonising food or occasional indulgence. Now, all allergies, religious beliefs, additions and health issues aside, I wanted to create a brand that celebrated great flavours, textures, and sensory experiences.

The red in logo most obviously points to "devil-like" undertones, but it's also a nod to common cocktail mixers and red fruit and berries used in a lot of baking.

The brown and cream tones reference a combination of ingredients in both baking and cocktails, plus add some warmth and sense of nature or human connection.

The typeface: Bodoni - chosen to mix a sense of craft and physical output by using a serifed type, along with an association of elevated experiences (e.g. fashion)

03 Tone of voice

I determined to stand out in such a crowded field like restaurant hospitality, the overall tone of the brand is to be helpful, but also cheekily influential. Being too formal or staid wouldn't break through. Being too casual or flippant wouldn't bring in the right demographic.

I landed on a tone that was akin to having a devil on your shoulder always nudging you, Yet because this is a concept built around enjoying drinks that can pack a punch, the writing language and tone should only ever nudge responsibly. Equal parts of "Ah, go on. Live a little." with a helping on "ok, let's not make tits of ourselves!"

The key inspirations for the tone include Rosalind Russel's Auntie Mame with a sprinkle of Emma Thompson.

03 Look and feel

The last 10-15 years has brought about a lot of sameness in brands' look and feel. Especially in the digital word, there is an emphasis to be slick and clean. This brand was all about being tactile, human, handmade - all the things that help us connect with each other and the food we consume. Imagery needed a mix of new and rustic.

04 The brand values

Taste and texture is paramount

Enjoying food helps to augment a great social interaction. Any recipes or pairings need to work, need to desirable and unforgettable.

Connection is the point

The recipes are not technical exercises for chefs. They are about creating an environment or experience where people can connect and enjoy themselves.

Craft over conformity

The experiences we're trying to create should be unique, as should anything we put out in the world. Tactile over digital, craft over AI ease (where it makes sense).

First: The cookbook

The "bakery" concept came out of a whole heap of stress baking.

After much positive feedback from those who received my baking yields: friends, family, co-workers, baristas, building receptionists.., I had a lot of prompts to open a store front. That's all great, but coming from people who were getting food for free! I started with the cookbook first... A book of sweet treat recipes paired with complementary cocktails - the sweeter alternative to wine and cheese pairing.

I wrote, designed and even usability tested this book with UX principles in mind including:

Larger font sizes to be easily read from 1 meter away
Landscape orientation so the book could lay flat on a counter
Extensive footnotes, indexing and recipe signposting
Measurements in imperial and metric
Tips and info for bakers and mixologist of all levels
All recipes user tested for understandability, measurements and clarity

Next: The app (still in progress)

As I leaned in on the pairing concept, I was also spending a lot of time with people who ran restaurants, wrote or used cooking blogs, or ran destination event workshops. Several commercial ideas began to appear as to what an app could do and how it could help ENHANCE the in person experience vs remove from it.

So how does AI help with IRL human situations? By helping the user find the perfect pairing of drink and treat where ever they are, whatever flavours they're having or after...

As this concept is still in development, much of the approach is still under NDA - these images are early concepts

04 What is currently in development

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Commercial strategy

I'm working a strategy that ensures this app that will NOT rely on display advertising or selling of user data. Currently, there are three avenues being pursued that can work for the audience this app and concept will be aimed at.

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Service mapping

With three distinct revenue and engagement lines for this business, I'm currently mapping out the service design including processes, disciplines, tools and coordination that will be involved short and long term.

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Marketing & social reach

Art directing and designing campaign assets and outdoor / physical media to help promote the launch of the cookbook. The social media plan is currently in the works to push the book and the initial app prototype concept.

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AI strategy + phasing

Mapping out how AI can best be integrated to enhance the experience without taking over - a combination of enhanced search and recommendation engines with extensions into booking and scheduling. Stay tuned!