Workshops with the Schmatz team
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.
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.
The pocket field guide included a series of elements from updated Schmatz values to beer tasting notes.
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.
The new company purpose we co-created with the Schmatz team:
"At Schmatz we aim to celebrate life together, every moment. This means inspiring our customers and team members to connect deeper, dream bigger, and live fuller."
"We do this by providing our customers with delicious and authentic beer, original German food, and friendly service."
"And for our team, we build a working environment together that fosters all members’ growth."
A special thank you to all contributors to the program.
Rebekah Cheng
Senior Program Manager / Strategic Designer
Nick Ashley
Sustainability Lead
Ai Yamanaka
Senior Strategic Designer
Keiko Ono
Senior Sustainability Strategist
Rieko Aiba
Coach-in-residence
Kumiko Michishita
Senior Visual Designer
Yuri Ito
Associate Visual Designer
James Hollow
CEO / Head of Strategy
Thomas Zimmerman
Creative Director
Shinsaku Iwatachi
Creative Director
Marc Luetten
CEO / Co-Founder
Christopher Ax
Co-Founder
Natsumi Takahashi
Head of Beer Team
Hiroka Yamaguchi
Head of People
