King’s Hawaiian
King’s Hawaiian is a Los Angeles-based family-owned and operated bakery, acclaimed for its Hawaiian breads and other specialties. Robert Taira founded the brand in Hilo, Hawaii in the late 1950s, but by the 1970s demand for his breads had grown so strong that he decided to move company headquarters to the mainland. Today, King’s Hawaiian has two factories producing a variety of breads and rolls that are sold in grocery stores nationwide. To loyal King’s Hawaiian fans, the brand’s tasty breads are just part of the attraction. Fans look to King’s Hawaiian’s collection of recipes for inspiration. Dishes like its ham and cheese Florentine bake offer a quick, easy, and highly satisfying dinner.
Challenge
King’s Hawaiian IT and eCommerce teams were maintaining multiple legacy platforms built over a ten year period which resulted in frustrated employees and a fragmented digital experience for customers. Because of this, we were asked to build a new site that can answer all the use cases the brand wanted its digital property to serve, including:
- Streamlining the workflow for its team members, so they can easily add new products and recipes to support the business
- Attractting new customers to the brand via its collection of recipes
- Promoting and selling new products as a market test before shipping to stores
- Highlighting and selling other emerging Hawaiian brands.
Solution
While IT was migrating data to a new, clean environment on BigCommerce, the King’s Hawaiian Marketing team was coming off a recent rebrand initiative with Haymaker, an advertising agency in Los Angeles. All three teams aligned quickly and assigned responsibilities: Haymaker would continue as the content creators, and my team would take over to create the brand’s new digital style. I consulted on product and lifestyle photography shoots to ensure the finished images would 1) work with page layouts and live text, and 2) be equally engaging in either a desktop or mobile-optimized aspect ratio.
The most exciting development for the King’s Hawaiian team, however, is the recipes app. Recipes are a major marketing strategy for the brand, and the company often partners with celebrity chefs to create them. The recipes have significant SEO value for King’s Hawaiian, and through the years have brought new customers to the brand. But managing them wasn’t an easy task. To address this challenge, we also created a standalone app in BigCommerce for storing and managing recipes, enabling team members to add recipes, images, and video, and to create new categories quickly and easily.
For customers, now when they visit their favorite King’s Hawaiian recipe, they can easily view and purchase the products used.
Result
King’s Hawaiian’s new website accomplishes multiple goals for the brand, enabling it to take the company and its business to a whole new level, and show the world that Hawaiian cuisine deserves a place on every food enthusiast’s plate.
