CASE STUDY
Cien Chiles
Heritage-inspired hot sauces and fixins built on honest ingredients, community, and sustainable sourcing
The Challenge
Chef Maria and Felipe came to Mindsy with a deeply personal mission: to bring heritage recipes made with honest, innovative ingredients to the world. They love the kind of food that brings people together while supporting communities and the planet. The conviction behind the brand was real and specific. The challenge was making it commercially legible in a crowded condiment market that had trained consumers to assume healthy food meant compromised flavor. The brand needed to overcome that perception while staying completely true to the values at its core.
The Work
Mindsy began by finding the Brand Soul and surfacing the purpose, personality, mission, and cultural DNA that made Cien Chiles irreplaceable in its category. The key consumer insight was the identification of the Healthy Hedonist: a passionate foodie who refuses to choose between indulgence and integrity, who loves the full ritual of cooking and sharing a meal, and who will pay for ingredients they can trust. From that foundation, Mindsy built a complete brand strategy, verbal identity, and packaging system that told the heritage story visually, with colors and illustration informed directly by the ingredients, the culture, and the land. The site launched in July 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, pivoting from farmers’ markets to e-commerce without losing momentum.
SCOPE
Amplify
DELIVERABLES
Brand Strategy
Messaging
Visual Identity
Packaging
Website
Brand Collateral
Social Media Assets
Printing Vendor Management
Brand Strategy
E-Commerce Site
Brand Photography
Copywriting
Social Media assets
The Shift
Cien Chiles launched into one of the most difficult retail environments in recent history and immediately found its audience. The first 1,000 bottles were sold within the first quarter. Page views spiked 184 percent. Social media reached 1,000 followers in the first month. The brand now has the strategy, identity, and packaging to grow from direct-to-consumer into retail channels, with a story that is clear, a visual identity that earns its place on the shelf, and a soul that has never been compromised.
Finding the Brand Soul
Through a series of exercises in the strategy session, we were able to define crucial aspects of the business, and we distilled lofty thoughts into actionable information. The Brand soul is a compilation of a brand’s purpose, personality, mission, vision, a deep study of its target audience, and culture. Defining the Brand Soul helps us create an objective roadmap; a decisional filter for all the brand’s future decisions. By checking against this statement, we can quickly see whether any decisions will serve or hurt the brand.
Consumer Insights
One of the key initial steps was identifying the audience that the brand wants to talk to. Cien Chiles don’t just sell something to someone. The brand has a message, and it needs to resonate with its intended audience, and not just their superficial demographics. Understanding their values and perspectives, through research and strategy, we were able to immerse ourselves into the psyche of the Cien Chiles key audience, the Healthy Hedonists. Passionate foodies who want an indulgent, uncompromisingly rich food experience that makes them feel good when they sate their cravings, people who love the entire meal experience, from the time spent crafting a meal over a hot fire, to the bonds you make over fragrant plates.
Strategically Thought, Mindfully Executed
Through a series of exercises in the strategy session, we were able to extract and refine the key pillars of the brand. This defined the brand’s personality: how it should look, sound, and act. By gaining clarity, uncovering the authentic story, defining a clear objective with strategy, we created an outward expression of their internal values, culture, and captured both their passion and their personality.
Crafting an Identity with Authenticity
Our stylescape exercise allows us to explore and push the limits in creating unique brand visuals. This stage helps us to marry visuals with brand attributes to create concepts, and strategize how we want to push and position the product line from a design standpoint.
Leveraging Opportunities with Inspiring Packaging
In strategizing the packaging design for Cien Chile’s product lines, a key initial step is to tell a compelling brand story through our packaging. An assessment of the competition in the different retail markets, along with an understanding of the consumer and what connects them with us, have allowed us to form a hierarchy of messaging points in our designs. Our process, inspired by the product and its unique traits, the colors & illustration informed by the ingredients, culture and brand’s story, all elements came together to bring the brand to life across the products consistently.
Website Design and Social Media Experience
The goal was to make it easy for users to discover and learn about the products, while cultivating sales throughout the user journey. After the launch of the site in July 2020, there was an immediate improvement in the metrics. Pivoting our strategy to start from farmers’ markets to online e-commerce, during the challenging Covid times, we created a dramatic jump in page views and sales. The first 1000 bottles were sold within the first quarter, the brand had an 184% spike on page views, reaching around 1000 followers in Social Media.
Read more on the website below ↓
Building Foundation
As with all new clients, our team begins our process by seeking to deeply understand the unique proposition of the business, its positioning, opportunities, and more. The site accomplishes a lot at once. It launches Cien Chile’s brand, it’s innovation to bring ancient ingredients to life and the company’s line-up of products both of which will expand. We conducted user research, product testing and designed it with intended users in mind and structured navigation to match their needs.
Brand Clarity
Seamless site experience Through a series of exercises in the strategy session, we were able to define the true value of the brand and defined the brand’s personality: how it should look, sound, and act. Clarity is often muddled by the things we can’t see. Restoring context gives us a clear path forward. Designing user experiences that delight is a difficult task. We collaborate with our skilled team of experts: user interface designers, copywriters, photographers, and engineers. Mindsy gathers a team of specialists to craft and optimize the cienchiles.com user experience.
Brand Photography
Brand is an experience, and visuals should help communicate that and showcasing brand style no matter what the touchpoint is, immersing the audience within brand story and including them on the journey. At Mindsy, we style the brand and the story aligned with the purpose. Images deserves just as much attention and planning and it’s a key part of our visual strategy. Styling brand and spending the time to produce a brand photoshoot allows you to communicate an intentional message, attracting dream audience, enticing them to join the brand and encouraging them to pay attention to what brand have to say.
Mobile Friendly Design
A significant percentage of Cien Chilies traffic consists of viewers on mobile devices. One of our primary goals was to craft the user interface design to be modular, in order to achieve perfect responsiveness, no matter the screen size.
In her own words
“Thank you so very much for EVERYTHING you have done to get us to this point. The laughs, the tears, the joy, the frustrations. You have truly captured the essence of Cien Chiles and brought it to life! Your professionalism and determination were key in the process of our brand development. You can savor that in every single asset created for Cien Chiles. Since the start of the discovery journey to bring this brand to life, you have shown and proven to be the best possible partner to walk this path to perfection. Thank you for carving our dreams on paper! This is only the beginning! Much Love and respect!”
Maria Covarrubias
Co-Founder of Cien Chiles & Culinary Specialist