Simply Lunch is a sandwich supplier, food-to-go, and lunch platter brand based in London. The brand is family-run and has been in business for over 30 years. 

The UK food-to-go market — predicted to be worth £23.4bn by 2027 — is constantly growing and changing, making staying ahead of it one of Simply Lunch’s main goals. The team is heavily focused on thinking ahead of the market and being first to market in different areas.

However, depending on emails and other manual methods for the creative process was putting a damper on Simply Lunch’s main goal of staying ahead of the competition.

Challenges

Previously, Simply Lunch’s creative workflow and processes were quite cumbersome.

The Simply Lunch team works with both internal and external stakeholders on packaging projects. Their external collaborators include customers — around 1000 of them — and manually collaborating with all these different people can get very challenging.

Earlier, the Simply Lunch team depended mostly on emails to get creatives approved and it was very easy to lose feedback in the back and forth of emails. With different email threads on the same creatives, the team often struggled to identify exactly what changes needed to be made. Trying to collate all comments on a single creative was an uphill battle for the Simply Lunch team prior to implementing Artwork Flow. 

Solution

With the creative process getting increasingly complex and time-consuming, the Simply Lunch team started evaluating different platforms in the market that would help them streamline their projects better. Artwork Flow’s automated workflows feature was what cinched the deal for Simply Lunch. 

With the Flexi Flows feature, the team now easily collaborates with stakeholders from the New Product Development (NPD), Marketing, and Branding teams to get creatives reviewed and approved on time. They also have multiple different workflows set up depending on the type of product and packaging. This has made project management so much easier and William can now easily ensure that all creative feedback is implemented before the product or pack is good to go.

The Simply Lunch team also found great value in the checklists feature on Artwork Flow. With this functionality, the team ensures they don’t miss any labeling requirements and no product goes to market until it’s fully approved with checks across the board.

External collaboration has also been streamlined, now that Simply Lunch uses Artwork Flow to collaborate with external stakeholders. Instead of emailing PDFs to external agencies, the team now uses Artwork Flow to get associated teams on the platform to review creatives and ensures all feedback exists within the same platform to be implemented.

Another feature the Simply Lunch team has been starting to utilize more is the digital asset management library. All their creatives are now present in one central repository — something Simply Lunch’s technical and food safety teams have been really impressed with. With DAM, the team now has 100% visibility into what changes have been made and the different versions of the same creative so far. 

And finally, the team has been impressed by how Artwork Flow does all this for them while being not very confusing or complicated in any way.

Impact

The Simply Lunch team has closely integrated Artwork Flow into their day-to-day creative operations and this has led to both qualitative and quantitative outcomes for the organization in terms of business operations.

On the qualitative side, Simply Lunch’s creative processes have now become so much more efficient and far easier. Some examples of this are:

• Greater visibility: Everyone now knows the status of any project at any given time and identifies bottlenecks effortlessly.
  
  
• Faster approvals: Their approval rate is also a lot faster, now that Artwork Flow’s proofing module ensures that their creatives are error-free.
  
  
• Simplified processes: Artwork Flow has streamlined Simply Lunch’s creative process, and made users’ day-to-day all the more efficient. According to William, the creative process itself is not very complicated, but depending on emails and multi-stage reviews from different stakeholders is what makes it complex. Artwork Flow makes the creative process all the more simpler with great visibility into project statuses, making life much easier for the team.
  
  
• Better productivity: The platform has also saved William's team a great deal of time and stress, making them more productive overall.

On the quantitative side, our influence on Simply Lunch’s success can be seen in the data associated with their creative operations right now. Some of them include:

• 100% visibility: The team now gets complete visibility into the status of any project at any given time.
  
  
• Easier implementation: Overall, it is now much easier for the Simply Lunch team to implement packaging formats and new packaging designs, easier by even tenfold.
  
  
• Reduced revisions: Before Artwork Flow, their creative process was so manual that the team doesn’t even have a number to put behind how long their review cycles were. Since implementing Artwork Flow, however, William has noticed that it only takes one and a half to two revisions per pack, as opposed to the five — or sometimes even ten  revisions any creative would have in the past.
  
  
• Faster sign-offs: Creative approvals have been accelerated at Simply Lunch after implementing Artwork Flow. Even if there are mistakes that need to be fixed, the team now approves creatives much faster because Artwork Flow shows them exactly what changes need to be made and where. Where it used to take them a week to sign off on a pack, it now takes them just a day or two maximum.

The Simply Lunch team is also extremely satisfied with the support they’ve received from Artwork Flow so far. Not only did they have a great onboarding process, but also receive constant help and support from the team on how to make the most out of the platform to achieve their business goals. 

Are you also interested in uncomplicating your creative process with Artwork Flow? Reach out to us today to see how easy creative collaboration can be!