Restructuring the catering arm digitally and maximizing the value as a woman-owned business
Since 1985, Katherine’s Catering has produced over 65,000 events. Innovation and growth are the secret ingredients to keeping the company fresh and relevant. Over three decades, the catering and events company has responded to how their clients use catering in their professional and personal lives. The one thing they’ve made sure never changed is the commitment to provide a service to their clients and community that is focused on delicious food, warm hospitality and creative flair.
Challenge:
Due to business challenges during Covid-19, Katherine’s has had to lay off the majority of their staff. With limited or almost no events, the business has had to pivot and transition to offering at-home meals and preparing to cater for smaller events and deliveries. Katherine’s is focused on reinventing the business from the well-established, full-service catering business it is known for, but also use this as an opportunity to have a stronger digital presence and create additional revenue streams.
Being a WBE-certified business nationally, the company has been uncertain how to create more awareness across all consumer touchpoints in an effort to attract businesses, especially corporations, focused on supporting and hiring women-owned businesses such as Katherine’s.
Solution:
Understanding what customers want and delivering it to them in a quick, easy, and seamless way is a good path for strong brand growth. After Blended Collective was tasked to perform a competitive benchmark analysis, our team recommended detailed marketing strategy plans around the offering of virtual cooking classes, a menu of the week at discounted prices, in-home entertainment meal kits, corporate lunch programs, and local business partnerships to offer kits of food items that are already being offered in a small quantity that can be offered on a larger scale.
Additionally, relevant communication changes were suggested to reflect more timely services digitally, given the Covid-19 crisis. While these are short-term solutions to ensure continued revenue, digital ordering was proposed for long-term appeal to also create new revenue streams.
Results:
Katherine’s is positioned to tap into creative, innovative and digital ways to stay top of mind during Covid-19 and create new revenue streams. As a well-established business, lots of great opportunities exist by promoting itself as a WBENC-certified WBE (women’s business enterprise) for local, regional and national exposure.
“We are fortunate to have connected with the Blended Collective team. Their marketing package shows a clear understanding of next steps to opening new doors and markets while building up our current customer base and products.
In addition, the plan to market our women-owned business certification includes an excellent list of access points that we’ve started to implement, including the launch of the recommended corporate lunch program to companies who are focused on hiring women-owned and certified businesses.
We are grateful to have our marketing recommendations and initiatives from Blended Collective to use as our guiding force, and look forward to working with them again.”
– Katherine Hilboldt Farrell, President and Owner, Katherine’s Catering