Salt & Straw’s Rad Readers + Student Inventors Campaign: Collateral Design
Salt & Straw uses ice cream as a platform for innovation. Each month Salt & Straw showcases a series of flavors that spark wonder, curiosity, and dare the ice-cream amorists to explore the ever-evolving menu over and over again. Founded in Portland, OR in 2011, the company has grown to 30+ shops in 5 states as well as a direct-to-consumer e-commerce business that ships nationwide.
In June 2021, Salt & Straw partnered with Scholastic to create The Rad Readers Series. Salt & Straw collaborated with Five Scholastic authors to create ice cream flavors that embodied their stories. The series included a Goosebumps flavor created with R.L. Stine and an extra cheesy cheesecake flavor based on a mouse character named Geronimo Stilton created by Elisabetta Dami.
The marketing team and I wanted to take this series one step further and inspire kids to write their own stories with a contest called “Fiction to Flavor”. I created a zine (both print and digital) that kids could use to write their own story and describe their dream ice cream flavor. The zine had a sticker sheet set to go along with it to make it extra fun and inviting for children. The kids then submitted their ice cream flavor ideas and stories to us for a special prize!
In April 2022, the Salt & Straw leadership team selected their top 5 favorite flavor ideas and stories. The “special prize” was Salt & Straw made these flavors real and launched them as the “Student Inventors Series”.
To promote is awesome community-driven flavor series, the marketing team and I created short films where the kids came to the kitchen and created the flavor themselves with the help of the R&D team. I animated the intro to the videos. I also designed another zine (print & digital) where customers could read the stories the kids wrote that were connected to each flavor.
Social Media Post Sample
Zine Page Sample
Video Intro Animation