FOREST RESTAURANT SUPPLY

Forest Restaurant Supply

was established in 2007 as a one stop shop for restaurant owners. They had three core ecosystems, Forest Delivery (warehouse, deliveries), Forest Store (storefront), and Forest Design (design agency focused on restaurant business). I got hired at Forest around August of 2018 and spent montha on the production side of Forest Design helping with printing (printing menu books, window posters, wall pepers, banners etc.) and installations. After a couple months on the production side I began working with design team.

I am very grateful for Forest because they took a chance with me, I had no portfolio, was still in college and they still hired me to be part of their team. Because of that opportunity, I worked extremely hard, to learn the adobe creative suite.

Forest Design was a small group and the mentality was all hands on deck. At first I was on revisions duty, making all the small edits that came in from customers so that meant i was editing things like $12.25 to $12.55 or typos we made like Freid Chicken to Fried Chicken. The worst feeling was sending a menu to print and noticing the typos as you recieve the final proof.

I later got moved up to speaking with clients and eventually started becoming more involved in the ideation and planning phase of the design process. This was valuable to me becasue I started to understand how this phase truly dictates the direction of the project and being clear here solves down the line miscommunication and misses on our part.

Around July of 2021, Forest Design was desolved leaving me and another designer to be integrated to the company to create the marketing side. Prior to this the company didn’t do any marketing, and I had to learn again new skills and way of thinking. Me, one of the head managers both started to combine our knowledge (Mine = Desing, Branding & Creativity + Manager = Restaruants, Pricing, Sales) to make something our customers would be interested in. We did email marketing, social media, updated the website, print advertising, collaborations with vendors & customers.
As of today I am constantly trying to grow my knowledge and integrate my love for storytelling and art to better help Forest connect with customers and non customers.