Tingkat by Su
Her grandmother’s recipes deserved more than a plastic container.
- location
- George Town, Penang
- service
- Branding
- result
- 3.1× festive gift-box orders
Su-Lin started cooking her grandmother’s Nyonya dishes from home during lockdown: kari kapitan, jiu hu char, and kuih by the tray, delivered in tingkat to neighbours. Three years later she had a 30-seat shophouse on a George Town back lane and a queue every weekend. The food had grown up. The brand hadn’t:
- The logo: made on a phone app in 2020, in three different colours depending on who printed it.
- Packaging: plastic containers with a sticker, for food people were driving across the island for.
- The menu: a laminated A3 sheet with 46 items, photos of mixed quality, and prices that hadn’t changed since the home kitchen.
- Instagram: a different look every week, depending on who on the team made the post.
- The next step: hotels and companies were asking about festive gift boxes and catering. Su-Lin had nothing that looked right to send them.
“It tastes like my grandmother’s kitchen. It should look like it too.”
Customers weren’t buying food. They were buying memory: the tingkat on the table, the kebaya prints, the Peranakan tiles. The brand needed to look like what the food already felt like.
The first gift box
Two weeks before Chinese New Year, a boutique hotel on Lebuh Armenian asked for 200 hampers for its regulars. Before the rebrand, Su-Lin would have said no, because she had nothing to put them in. This time she sent the gifting deck that afternoon. The hotel ordered the tiered kuih box with the enamel tingkat, and guests began walking down the lane to find the restaurant on the label.
What we built
Su-Lin’s time: a half-day brand workshop, three review rounds and sign-off. We handled design, copy, photography direction and print production with the suppliers.
The team it replaced
- +18%
- average spend, after the new menu and prices
- 3.1×
- festive gift-box orders
- 14
- corporate gifting clients in the first year
One year later
- Average spend rose 18% after the new menu and prices.
- Festive gift-box orders rose 3.1× in the first season, and the hampers sold out a week before Chinese New Year.
- 14 corporate gifting clients signed in the first year, including two hotels and a bank.
- The team posts four times a week using the templates, without a designer.
- Takeaway boxes became the most-tagged item on the account.
“People used to love the food and apologise for the packaging. Now they photograph the box first.”
Su-Lin