SELECTED WORK CASE STUDY
← Back to Work with meOAZA Joyful Kitchen
Growing a restaurant brand beyond marketing.
OAZA Joyful Kitchen was a plant-based restaurant and social enterprise in the centre of Zagreb. Over several years, my role grew far beyond managing social media or running individual campaigns.
Marketing decisions were closely connected to the restaurant itself — its offer, daily operations, events, catering, customer experience and the way the brand showed up both online and in the physical space.
Plant-based restaurant & social enterprise
- Brand strategy
- Content
- Campaigns
- Customer journey
- Hospitality marketing
- Events / activations
01Context
A restaurant brand with much more happening than food alone.
OAZA had many things happening at once: a daily restaurant offer, fast-casual products, catering, events, a cooking school, educational projects and a strong social mission.
Over time, the goal became much bigger than simply promoting a menu. We were shaping how all of those pieces could feel like one coherent brand and one recognisable experience.
02Challenge
Turning a complex business into a brand people could understand and remember.
The challenge was to continuously find new reasons for customers to discover OAZA, visit, return and recommend it — while working within the realities of hospitality.
Menus changed. Capacity was limited. Different offers served very different audiences. Ideas had to work operationally, not only look good in a campaign.
Marketing therefore could not sit outside the business. It had to connect to the offer, staff, customer experience and everyday decisions inside the restaurant.
03What I did
Brand, content, campaigns and customer experience — connected.
I worked across brand, content, campaigns and customer experience.
That included shaping positioning and messaging, developing campaigns, planning social and email content, creating promotional concepts, supporting launches and events, and building communication around different parts of the business.
We also worked on how individual products and experiences were presented — from the Joyful Kebab and daily meals to catering, workshops and seasonal offers.
Campaign ideas increasingly connected the online message with what happened inside the restaurant: signage, staff communication, reviews, repeat visits, tourist discovery and the overall customer journey.
- Positioning & messaging
- Content strategy
- Campaign concepts
- Email communication
- Customer journey
- Events & workshops
- Tourist discovery
- Loyalty & retention thinking
04How we worked
Marketing became part of running the restaurant.
The collaboration was highly iterative.
Instead of marketing receiving a finished product and simply promoting it, we often developed the idea, offer and communication together.
A marketing question could become an operational question:
What should the offer actually be? Who is it for? How should staff explain it? What happens after someone walks through the door? What would make them come back?
That made marketing part of the way the restaurant evolved, rather than a layer added afterwards.
- Idea
- Offer
- Experience
- Communication
- Feedback
- Next iteration
05What changed
A more recognisable brand with a broader ecosystem around it.
Over the years, OAZA developed into a much more coherent and recognisable brand with an ecosystem that extended beyond the restaurant itself.
The work included catering, educational events, cooking workshops, sustainability initiatives and campaigns aimed at locals, tourists and businesses.
International visitors increasingly discovered the restaurant through platforms such as HappyCow and TripAdvisor, while a loyalty programme helped strengthen repeat relationships with local customers.
The biggest change was less visible in a single metric:
marketing became connected to the product, customer experience and business decisions themselves.
OAZA became a brand with a point of view — not simply a place serving vegan food.
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