Case Study: Yeti's Post

ALTERNATE TITLE: I DON’T JUST DRAW STUFF, Pt. 2

Because it’s raining, and my wrist is all messed up, I figured I might as well use this blog. Here’s the second of a few case studies on projects I’ve done recently that I found to be really enjoyable.

Last summer I ate the best bacon I’ve ever tasted at a new restaurant a few blocks from my house, Yeti’s Post. They specialize in donuts, breakfast and lunch food, and catering. A few visits later and I was sold, I’d found my new favorite place to eat in town. The food was unique and top notch, the donuts were rich and wonderful, and I loved their tagline: “Food for mountain people.”

So I continued to eat too many donuts and gain weight, and admire Yeti’s Post from afar. Finally though, I got around to doing something about it though. I started off small, adapting an earlier, unused illustration of a guy on a mountain bike sipping a beer to be a guy on a mountain bike eating a donut. I got a few sample stickers made and, like a creeper, left them on the restaurant’s front step with a business card.

Luckily Yeti’s Post owner and chef, Seth, wasn't too weirded out by my offering and wanted to chat. Over many pork bowls and donuts I started to do some work for the restaurant.

We started off simply with more stickers, a skier, snowboarder, kayaker, and climber joined the mountain biker. A lot of Seth’s goal with Yeti’s Post is to fuel folks who play outside. He’s open early enough that you can grab a burrito and some coffee as you head out to go skiing, and he’s got a wide variety of grab-and-go food for people in a hurry. And, one of the key aspects of what he does is custom catering.

Basically, throw any event that needs food at him and he can make it happen. Yurt trips, weddings, feasts, he does it all. And he can meet just about any dietary requirements.

So later, when he asked me if I ever do websites, I was happy to jump into the Yeti’s Post site.

A common theme of these case studies is “Clients who started to make a website, but then realized they have more important things that they need to do and would rather be doing.” I pretty regularly get handed a site with a few pages up, that needs a lot of building out and tweaking. Luckily, that process is really fun.

So Seth and I made a list of things the website needed to do, and then I made a list of things I needed from him to make that happen. With that in hand, we scheduled a time for me to come in and shoot some photos for the site. Seth’s food looks as good as it tastes and shooting was easy.

With those photos in hand I got to work on the site. They already had most of the design elements and page layout chosen, so I really just focused on organizing things, creating a few new pages, optimizing for mobile, and making it all look good.

One thing that’s come in handy with several jobs like this is my history as a photographer. I have a backlog of thousands of skiing, hiking, landscape, and mountain bike photos that I hold all the rights to, so there’s no hassle of chasing down stock photography.

I fleshed out the site with some mountain shots from my catalogue, and got everything running smoothly. There will be some updates in the future as we add the functionality to order online, but for now, here’s the site: www.yetispost.com.

With the bones of the site done, we took on two other tasks: merch, and the blog.

Merch was fairly easy. I’ve spent too much of my life figuring out the simplest way to offer apparel and accessories online, so I was able to get the Yeti’s Post store up and running quickly. Here’s a link to the online shop.

The Yeti’s Post shop offers a range of apparel and accessories, and it’s set up so that everything drop ships automatically. There’s no paying for large minimum orders, no stocking and storing merch at the shop, and no dealing with the hassle of mailing out orders. The customer just clicks and orders and their stuff shows up magically.

Finally, we put together a blog to help keep folks up to date with what’s going on, as well as help with SEO, and dig deeper into some of the services Yeti’s Post offers.

That means that every month I write a few posts highlighting what’s going on at the restaurant, as well as talking about upcoming events, and diving deeper into services they offer. It’s also a fun opportunity to help shape the restaurants personality, with funny posts, and quirky ideas. Here’s the blog.

It helps out with search engine optimization, digs deeper into who Yeti’s Post is and why they exist, and makes for great social media content.

I’ve really appreciated getting to work with Yeti’s Post so far, and am excited to keep helping them out.