We’re back from a fabulously good time on the Oregon coast, filled with dear friends and family. And food. So much food. One of the highlights was our inaugural visit to ONA Restaurant & Lounge. We can’t say enough about how much we enjoyed the restaurant. We hope you all feel the same about their new website.
Stumptown delivery van logo, a Needmore design circa 2003.
Stumptown delivery van logo, a Needmore design circa 2003.
In a recent open letter, Mark Pastore (of San Fransisco’s restaurant Incanto) wrote a passionate and informative letter about the difficulties of working with OpenTable, the most ubiquitous online restaurant reservation system boasting to be Trusted by 15,000 restaurants & 175 million diners.
Mark points out that OpenTable not only co-opts a restaurant’s relationship with their customers, but that it also
[takes] home a disproportionate (relative to other vendors) chunk of the restaurants’ revenues each month and [this creates] the feeling of being trapped in the service…too expensive to keep, but letting it go could be harmful.
He quotes one restauranteer as saying,
OpenTable is out for itself, the worst business partner I have ever worked with in all my years in restaurants. If I could find a way to eliminate it from my restaurants I would.
Mark makes a passonate plea. He asks that,
the next time you’re planning to dine out, consider picking up that 19th-century device, the telephone, and calling. I know I speak for many restaurateurs when I say that we’d love to hear your voice.
While I couldn’t agree more with Mark and his reservations about OpenTable, there is a reason people choose a system like it—convenience. And, thinking about the phone as old-school ignores the very real fact that phones (as mobile devices) are the future of websites, not the past. And this is good news for restauranteurs like Mark.
There is a way out from working with businesses such as OpenTable and the like. To do so restaurants need to start thinking about how their customers are going to interact with their own website and how they can make it as easy as possible for them to pick up the phone and call them. Or find out where they are. Or see their latest specials.
Consider that I’m downtown, a passenger in a moving car, and want to ring up a restaurant about a reservation. I’m out of luck with most restaurants as their website are in Flash. Incanto’s website, which I think is lovely, gets kudos for not being in Flash. However, on my iPhone, I still find it difficult to quickly figure out how to call them.
Have we made websites in Flash for restaurants in the past? Or, websites that make it difficult to touch base on a mobile device. Yes, yes we have. But, time marches on and we’ve seen the writing on the wall. We are moving in a new direction here at Needmore—gorgeous websites on your computer, simple and clear websites on your mobile device. No fuss, no Flash.
The Ona Restaurant website is finished, by the way, and we hope to tell you a lot more about that project in the next few days.
Tom’s of Maine is one of those companies you almost don’t notice. They’re just there in the background. When you brush your teeth. When you wash out your mouth. I’m not sure how long I have been aware of them, but I didn’t think they had been around for all that long.
Turns out, they’ve been around since 1970, when they were started by a couple with five thousand dollars.
One of the few things I did know about them, however, is that they had been bought out by a big health care company. And that did confuse my image of them just a little bit. Turns out that rumor was true.
In 2006, a controlling 84% stake in Tom’s of Maine was purchased by Colgate-Palmolive for US $100M. The Chappells kept a 16% share in the company. The terms of the purchase stipulate that Tom’s of Maine’s policies will be retained.
Well that’s good, it sounds like the story has some kind of a happy ending. And in another sign of their changing times, they appear to have redesigned their identity late this year. Here is a before and after.
It’s interesting, and I do myself prefer it, but I think it fell slightly short of the mark.
For one thing, we found that the two colors seemed… odd. Why is “of Maine” blue, but the rest of the extra design green? Probably because the name of the company is “Tom’s of Maine,” but using the two colors almost seems like an afterthought.
Also, the “Since 1970″ is an interesting addition, and in fact it’s what prompted us to write about this. Yet the big win with the old logo is that it didn’t need to say it was 40 years old. It was obvious in the design!
Between us, we suspect there was a lot of internal debate about this logo. I would be very curious to find out who designed it (VML?) and what the process was behind it.
The publishers at Savoir Flair have been busy this year. They have launched a gorgeousMagazine series and amassed an impressive fashion video collection. It was high time that their simple home page underwent a sophisticated makeover.
Before
The original home page layout worked well when Savoir Flair was in its infancy as an online publication. The latest articles in a handful of sections were automatically updated and therefore the home page was new daily.
After
The new home page highlights more of what has come to distinguish Savoir Flair in fashion publishing – daily fashion feature articles, magazine highlights, runway coverage, and remarkable videos.
