Shoogies NYC

Creating delicious homemade organic baby food delivered to your doorstep.

My Role: Co-Founder, Creative Director, Visual Designer & Front-end Developer

The Team: Me, Co-Founder & Developers

The challenge: Create an online store for our homemade organic baby food delivery business while maintaining a full-time job. The timeline was six months.

My role & approach: The idea to start this business came after my girlfriend finished her MBA and started making healthy baby food recipes for her niece. We talked about it and thought it might be fun to start a baby food company, and give parents a healthier option. And so we bootstrapped and split tasks based on our strengths. She focused on the business side and I focused on design and development. We both researched the market and spoke to parents to figure out their needs. At the time, every baby food website we saw felt old and bland. So when designing the brand I focused on our vision of creating a fun and playful company. This consisted of me sketching out concepts and getting feedback, ultimately leading to Shoogies NYC. I also art directed our product photo shoot and did food styling, which I had never done. Once she had created a variety of recipes we needed to take photos of all the food. She hired a friend to take photos for the site and of the food. I focused on the art direction and food styling to make sure it followed the brands aesthetic and feel. After researching platforms, I decided to go with Expression Engine because of it's flexibility and e-commerce plugin, but I didn't have experience with either. So I found a company to help us with the e-commerce side of development. Prior to starting development I created wireframes and low fidelity designs to get quick feedback to see if we were on the right track. Once that was confirmed I created documentation for them to follow, which we would review together–to make sure it was feasible based on our timeline, and budget. Then I would create high fidelity designs to highlight the users experience and interactions for them to implement on the back-end and front-end. We went through this process for a couple of weeks before going live.

The impact: This was when I learned about the Pomodoro Method, which is a method for working efficiently using a timer. It helped me become extremely efficient with calculating and completing tasks. I learned a lot about creating a food company from the preparation of the food, storage, regulations in NYC, and delivery. After launch we received a lot of positive feedback from the mommy community in New York. We were mentioned in TimeOut, Observer and RedTri. Proving that even with so many big players in the market there is always room to innovate and give better options.