Ritual
Ritual is an app that lets users pre-order, pay ahead, and skip the line at nearby restaurants and cafes. It’s all about saving time and enjoying a seamless pickup experience.
Designing Ritual’s In-Store Merchandise
Role: Lead Designer
Year: 2019 / 2020
The Challenge
As the Lead Designer, I partnered with our Senior Content Strategist, Head of Marketing, and General Sales Managers worldwide to tackle a design challenge: creating in-store merchandise that attracted new users while staying true to each merchant's unique branding. Oh, and it had to scale across seven countries and multiple languages—no big deal, right?
The goal was to communicate Ritual’s three key value props:
Saving time (because no one loves standing in line).
The Piggyback feature (because sharing a pickup saves time—and your hairdo in bad weather).
Ritual Rewards (because loyalty should pay off).
The Process
We started by creating a few initial poster designs and heading directly to local merchants for feedback. Our goal was to see if they liked the designs enough to display them in their stores. This approach helped because, in the past, we had pushback from merchants who felt previous materials didn’t align with their brand or space.
Through these conversations, we refined our approach and created a suite of counter cards, decals, and posters that focused on Ritual’s three key value props. To make the designs as versatile and impactful as possible, we transitioned the brand into illustration. This was a strategic decision for several reasons:
No food bias: A pasta poster wouldn’t fly at a sushi joint. By focusing on the Ritual experience instead of specific dishes, we kept our designs versatile for any type of restaurant or café.
Cultural inclusivity: Stock photos only go so far. Illustration allowed us to reflect diverse cultures, people, and experiences.
Scalability: As we internationalized, illustrations became importing when adapting to cultural nuances.
Once we finalized the designs, we took things a step further. With the help of Brandfolder, we enabled our field sales team to customize the merchandise with their own Ritual QR codes, making it even easier for merchants to onboard users. This saved our small design team time and freed us up to keep moving fast on other projects.
