Case studies

Schmatz

Shaping a food and beverage brand around
team culture with Schmatz

Problem

Over ten years Schmatz have scaled from a single food truck to being the biggest German beer and dining experience in Japan, with 40 restaurants and a boutique beer brand sold in retail and online stores.

As the company rapidly grew, Schmatz’s founders realised their purpose, vision, and values needed to be renewed to ensure all of their new team members felt the same sense of belonging and brand pride they’d been able to create in the early years.

They deeply believed that creating a good employee experience results in a good customer experience, bringing German principles around hospitality and service to every part of the brand. This is what they sought to capture and scale as part of their new values and shared team culture.

Workshops with the Schmatz team

Approach

We collaborated with the founders and key team members to understand their brand story in detail, identifying the core principles they’d built the company around.

Going deeper, we then expanded this to all levels of the organisation – from head office to store team members from every restaurant – conducting a series of interviews and workshop activities to co-create their new purpose, vision, and values.

The brand architecture we designed in these sessions went through multiple rounds of iterations with Schmatz team members, bringing the entire company on the journey to ensure we would deliver on key program objectives around belonging and retention.

This resulted in a new brand toolkit and series of artefacts – including a pocket field guide designed by our friends at The Carpenter & The Stone, a key touchpoint for all Schmatz team members to use to document their employee journey.

We also supported the CEO through a series of internal storytelling and communications activities. This included creating videos, posters, and multi-tiered training programs delivered with their Head of People.

Pocket Field Guide

The pocket field guide included a series of elements from updated Schmatz values to beer tasting notes.

Outcomes

This co-designed approach to developing their new purpose and values led to positive change among Schmatz’s 600+ team members, with waves of support throughout the organisation as their new brand architecture was launched.

All of new head office and store manager teams were onboarded using the new brand toolkit within the initial months of launch.

Strategic initiatives generated as part of the work have also been adopted by Schmatz for their company OKRs, with a two year roadmap to continually uplift the employee experience.

We’ve built on this through a series of longitudinal workshops and interviews with team members to assess their experience of the new brand and ways of working over time – identifying further ways to iterate the roadmap, define employee initiatives, and support future growth.

All of new head office and store manager teams were onboarded using the new brand toolkit within the initial months of launch.

Strategic initiatives generated as part of the work have also been adopted by Schmatz for their company OKRs, with a two year roadmap to continually uplift the employee experience.