This is the promise Tatte makes to its guests and team members. It was our job to bring it to life through a digital commerce experience that balanced brand with performance.
For Tzurit Or, building a bakery was about more than just cultivating a thriving business; it was a way to create a sense of home and community while starting a new life as an immigrant to the United States. Her vision for Tatte was humble in origin – grounded in a simple mission to bring people together around great food and pastries while providing a deep sense of comfort and belonging.
Today, Tatte is everything a brand should be. Tzurit’s commitment to the team members and cafe experience makes it one of the few examples where their brand already runs deep – we just need to let the world know.
That was our job. Spend time with the business, understand what makes Tatte so special – and then dial it up to eleven to create a commerce experience that feels uniquely Tatte.
As Tatte scales, it risks losing what made it special in the first place—a local café experience that serves as a fixture in the community. To avoid “feeling like a national franchise,” we had to ditch out-of-the-box eCommerce formulas and invent our own.
A brand-led approach, an editorial look at feel, exaggerated imagery, and expressing the brand story (without getting in the way) helped shape a digital experience that balanced short-term commercial goals with brand longevity.
Tatte's menu is unique in several ways – and way more complex than it appears on the surface. The menu is broad, there's a lot of unfamiliar foods, and day-parting spans everything from weekend brunch menus to dinner service.
We designed a menu experience that feels simple (despite the complexity behind the scenes), invented some rather smart fixes to common problems (see Neighborhood Menu), and supports guests in exploring new flavors.
Prices and availability oftentimes differ across locations, and that can make it challenging to show an accurate menu. We didn't want to force guests to enter a zip code before seeing the menu so we created the "Neighborhood" menu. Giving us your zip code doesn't just give you accurate pricing and availability – it also shows the feature menu items specific to that singular location. It was considered an elegant solve to a common problem with integrated menus.
We know...most users are showing up on mobile and that was our focus (we promise). We defined a simple set of rules that allowed us to deploy responsive-friendly components easily.
Given the breadth and unfamiliarity (wait until you taste seared halloumi!), it was important to create a menu experience that let people explore, learn about the ingredients, and explore again. We designed the experience to support this browsing behavior in new and interesting ways – all while ensuring a quick path to checkout.
A sole focus on commerce isn't enough, and – quite frankly – it's not really Tatte. The real magic of their new digital experience comes from elevating the Tatte story, particularly around their role in the community.
We created smart pathways, components, and strong POV around integrated marketing that led us into an experience that feels editorial and reinvents how we think about each individual location.
We believe we built a new digital experience that's attractive, uniquely Tatte, and commercially performant – but we're more excited about the work that happened behind the scenes. We ran workshops, operated as a unified team, placed this work in a broader strategic context, and worked to ensure that Tatte would be successful long after our engagement ended.
Standing up the Tatte Design System (at least the beginnings of it) was one of the most important things we could do to set up the team for success. It helped create consistent patterns for new designers, set the tone for accessibility, and shape the development componentry in a smart, scalable way.
See how we're using the Tatte Design System to build a new webpage in five minutes...
Ryan leads our experience design practice and has led engagements for some of the biggest brands in food and beverage – including brands like Keurig, Dunkin’, Toast, Panera, Bai Beverages, and more.
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