Employer
- Flowers Foods, parent company of Tastykake
Date
- May 2018 - Current
Job Responsibilities and Accomplishments
- ● Increased creative development while functioning as Creative Director, Photographer, and Co-Founder of the internal agency
- ● Increased sales and marketing performance by creating world-class designs for brands such as Nature’s Own, Dave’s Killer Bread, Wonder Bread, and Tastykake, increasing equity from $4.3 to $4.9 billion
- ● Managed external creative partnerships with companies like Disney, Sega, Sony, Nickelodeon and the USO
- ● Lead the design team and oversaw external agencies for all creative projects
- ● Manage internal team of 7, while also developing and mentoring their professional development
- ● Integrated stay interviews with department to help retain exceptional talent.
- ● Led website and digital marketing team while steering social media, digital, and print campaigns
- ● Generated $54,000 in annual savings by moving 6 websites under 1 platform.
- ● Drove a 25% improvement in design turnaround time by integrating project management tools.
- ● Saved $2 million by bringing 80% of all design work back in-house.
Sony Picture’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Campaign
Towards the end of 2022, Flowers Food was approached by Sony Pictures about the possibility of a promotional tie-in with Tastykake, the main cake and snacking brand under Flowers Foods that has been around for over 100 years, using their upcoming new animated movie, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
Much like our work on Disney’s Frozen II campaign, the team set out to create captivating artwork on our packaging and in-store and OOO (out-of-home) displays.
With Tastykake’s presence growing nationwide, it made sense for Sony to pick the snacking brand, which is becoming a favorite indulgent treat among younger people and those who’ve grown up with the east coast snacking juggernaut.
This promotion excited the team, as we’re all fans of Spider-Man and the first movie. It also gave us the ability to include some very cool design elements, ripped right from the film and from the comic books, like fonts, hash tone patterns, and plenty of cool “wormy dealies” (a northern slang for cool, random accents and wavy lines).
Building the concept
Obviously, when tasked with creating a promotion utilizing a very public and fan-favorite character from comics, that is known all over the world, it can be a bit daunting. But my team and I were ready for the challenge.
We started off by combing through all of the provided assets from Sony, then we began to concept different layouts, as Tastykake has a wide variety of products that come in many different form factors. We needed to make sure we had a consistent brand look that worked across all of the selected products that would be used during the campaign.
Much like Disney, the folks at Sony were very impressed and the approval process for the “initial” design went smoothly. Then we began to spread the approved design to the rest of the product lineup.
“Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought.”