Giang Nguyen
Designer
Alex Yates
Creative Director
Emma Krueger
Account Manager
Background
The Neighbourhood, a new pan-Asian restaurant in Hanoi’s hip West Lake district, faced a daunting task for its opening. Starting a new restaurant is never easy, but starting one in the midst of a monthslong pandemic lockdown in something else entirely. But these founders leaned into the challenge, taking advantage of city-wide closures to perfect their menu and take time developing the perfect brand.
Fourdozen worked with The Neighbourhood team from the beginning of the project. We were there as the walls and roof went up, inspecting the new space, creating a logo and selecting brand colors, designing menus and packaging, and assisting these passionate founders with a delivery-first launch strategy for challenging times.
Our Big Idea
As a Hanoi-based agency, Fourdozen loves being part of the community of innovators and risk takers that make the city such a dynamic place to live. Each year, we make sure that we are not only working with big brands, but also with newer ones that have great ideas. Because we wanted to work with them, Fourdozen developed an innovative fee structure for new businesses and entrepreneurs with ideas we believe will make our city richer. This enabled Fourdozen to get started with The Neighbourhood from its initial planning stages, and apply our creative thinking from the business’s birth.
The logo design process for The Neighbourhood was rooted in typography. The color scheme, muted forest greens and yellows, was picked to stand out from the other brands in the area. Working with these simple elements, Fourdozen’s designers were able to create an attractive identity that would ground their nascent social media properties, and that reproduced well on delivery packaging, uniforms, and swag. An identity that was all the more important during a lockdown, because for the time being it was all customers could see of this exciting new dining option.
With the beautiful design polished and approved, we moved right into production, taking advantage of menu tasting sessions to produce a gorgeous portfolio of food imagery. We also connected the founders with our network of artists and printers to create custom packaging, so that when new customers ordered their food there could be no mistaking where it came from. This was particularly important to us, given the outstanding quality of the food. When it’s your job to make the first impression for a dish you believe in, the packaging should be nothing less than stunning to look at.
Results
When The Neighbourhood finally opened for delivery in early October, it was prepared with a full suite of brand assets, and a lively social media presence. Outstanding design online gave the founders materials that they could share with their personal networks, and targeted advertising spread brand awareness to tens of thousands of potential customers matching carefully constructed profiles. And just as we had hoped, when the first meals began to make their way through the city, Instagram and Facebook came alive with social content from satisfied customers.
