The making of a star.

During my time at Chef’n, the design team had not only delivered a unique product (a strawberry huller), but they had also nailed the overall product design. Designed to resemble its intent, Chef’n’s strawberry huller had the potential of being an industry darling.

In order to ensure its success, that commercialization and marketing of the product needed to be as spot on as the design itself. To match it’s cute design, the marketing team delivered the name StemGem (which almost lost out to Steminator, but not on my watch). The team then developed a comprehensive marketing and PR launch plan including storytelling, presentations, imagery, video content and more. Timing for food based products is critical due to seasonality, so PR introduction timing was crucial especially when print magazines had a 6-9 month lead time . The StemGem was an overnight success and much of this was due to the prolific PR efforts that resulted in a full-page placement worth over $500K in advertising costs in the #1 women’s and home publication that had over 3M print subscribers at the time.