Mr. Steak, 2013 to 2020
Seven years inside one brand.
From 2013 until the spring of 2020, I was Mr. Steak’s creative department. Not a vendor they called for a project. The person who drew the logo, built the websites, shot the food, launched the subscription, and sat in the meetings where the decisions got made.
A steak company that needed to look like one.
Mr. Steak came to me needing an identity. What they needed, and what became clear quickly, was somebody who would still be there in three years when the identity had to survive a package redesign, a retail pitch, and a direct-to-consumer launch nobody had planned for yet.
That is the part most branding engagements cannot do. A brand gets designed, handed over in a PDF, and then slowly comes apart in the hands of whoever has to use it day to day.
The mark came first, and it held for seven years.
I proposed a branding iron. It is the one object in the category that means exactly what the brand meant: heat, cattle, a name burned into the thing itself, and a shape that survives being stamped on a box, a truck, or a race car.
“Universally positive on the logo. Beautiful job. Let’s keep the look and expand.”
Mitch Scully, founder of Mr. Steak, logo approval, March 2013
They kept the look. It expanded for seven years.
What “expand” turned out to mean
- Three websites, each one rebuilt for what the business had become since the last one
- A direct-to-consumer subscription, built and launched, with the email and lifecycle machinery behind it
- Packaging, including a move to carbon-neutral materials well before that was a common ask
- A NASCAR sponsorship, taken from concept through the assets a race weekend actually consumes
- Retail pursuits with Costco, Bass Pro, and Cabela’s, and the pitch materials those rooms require
- 833.MRSTEAK, and everything that has to be true for a vanity number to be worth owning
Photography, video, packaging, web, email, and the pitch decks. One person, seven years, one brand that stayed recognizably itself the whole way through.
Product photography for the online store, 2019.
The work was never the deliverable.
Seven years of one relationship produces something a project cannot. By year three I was not asking what the brand should look like. I knew. I could make a decision about a package die-line or a landing page headline the same way an employee would, because I had been in the room for every decision that came before it.
That is what embedded means, and it is why I still work this way. The value was not any single asset. It was that somebody who understood the whole thing was making all of it.
“You’re going to be part of Mr. Steak’s forever, I hope.” And I said I already felt like I was.
Mitch Scully, June 2019
It ended, and that is worth saying out loud.
The engagement wound down in the spring of 2020, along with a great many things that spring. I have not worked with Mr. Steak since.
I include this because a case study that quietly implies a client is still on the books is the kind of small dishonesty that tells you what else to distrust on a website. Seven years was the work. Seven years is the proof. It does not need to still be running to count.
This is what a long engagement looks like.
Most of my clients did not hire me for seven years. They hired me for one thing, and then the relationship kept finding more work worth doing. That has happened often enough now that I built the practice around it on purpose.