How to Visually Create a Positive First Impression As a Vegan Business on a Vegan-Resistant World.
Staging, Planning & Keeping it Vegan — in only Two Days.
Almost everyone knows that opening a business is not always the easiest; now opening a vegan business can have some challenges. Just because the vegan movement is not the biggest. But hey don’t worry, on a very bright side - it is growing faster than ever!
So when we started with this quest of getting a nice professional shoot for introducing ourselves on our About page, we encounter the expected challenge of finding inspiration in a world that is polluted with advertising of animal products. Which of course if we are on the topic of keeping everything vegan, this can be sometimes a bit daunting.
And on top of this, we faced a short timeline of only two days prior to this photoshoot because this idea only came to us during our last days in the city!
We were visiting my home town Cuenca, Ecuador, which made it perfect to be able to collaborate with our talented friends, David Gutierrez (Photography Director) & Marcela Torres (Backstage Video Specialist) to create some special looking first impression pictures.
Finding Engaging Vegan Inspiration
I started our search for inspiration around some well known creative studios, agencies, web awards pages. However, I was not able to find something that would resonate enough with our community.
I quickly realized the best inspiration for the work we do is among all the vegan wave/revolution content that we see coming up on a daily basis.
We made a quick list of our favorite vegan brands and started to look them up, to figure out who is doing it best.
I won’t add this list here, so this blog post does not become a 1-hour read ;)
Unveiling some distinguished brand positioning.
Here are a few great examples from he ones who stood out the most:
Daily Harvest, Impossible Foods & Oatly.
And most people’s favorite, Oatly. The brand that has managed to achieve the positioning of independence and sympathetic alternative for dairy products.
Looking for the voice behind them, John Schoolcraft Creative Director at Oatly strongly states “we want to change the norm.”
Defining that Vegan Concept & Style
While crafting the mood board from this inspiration that stood out to us, we unveiled some keywords for our desired core concept:
- Happiness
- Spontaneity
- Lively
- Different
…just like a vegan world would be.
Enhancing our Vegan Brand Look
Keeping our brand colors aligned with the concept; our purple had to be set as the high contrasting element at the backstage, and our green was brought in through some extra supporting elements around us, having this secondary color bring life to the shoot.
For the Vegan Feel
- Brought in some plants to get a smooth connection to a nature feel, and some fruits in the hand to enhance the spontaneity and keep things fun.
- Carried some local bright fruits to enhance the spontaneity and keep things fun: Jackfruits & Avocados (homegrown big avocados!).
- We didn’t give the outfits too much consideration; we just made sure to wear something with contrasting & bright colors.
The Results
The main one / where we are “more calmed” that is used in the still state.
Until the mouse hovers (or touch on mobile) that a quick “more fun, happy and spontaneous” 3 picture sequence plays.
I personally have some camera phobia, so it is actually a challenge for me to be in front of a lens. However we knew that with David and Marcela we had nothing to worry about, they were going to keep us laughing through the whole shoot. Maybe even a bit too much! :)
