TOAST | FULL CASE STUDY
Scaling a Brand from Startup to Public Market
When I joined Toast in 2020, the brand had strong bones and startup energy. What it didn't have was a system that could scale. Over the next six years, we built one.
The work covers a lot of ground: an IPO, national campaigns, product launches, a self-service brand platform, an Investor Day, and the quiet daily work of keeping a fast-moving brand coherent. This is the full story.
Building the Creative Organization
I inherited a team of three. The brief wasn't just hire more people. It was figure out what kind of organization the brand needed, then build it.
Over six years, I grew the team to sixteen multidisciplinary specialists. That meant defining roles that didn't exist yet, hiring people who could work at startup speed without sacrificing craft, and structuring the team so it could run high-stakes initiatives like an IPO while staying agile enough to pivot when the business needed it.
3 to 16 creative team growth
Brand Evolution
Toast's identity needed to evolve from startup to enterprise without losing what made the brand feel honest and grounded. Enterprise credibility and startup personality usually pull in opposite directions. We held both.
We directed a comprehensive visual evolution in partnership with external agencies, scaled the internal team to support it, aligned the vision with executive stakeholders, and made sure the new identity worked from the NYSE floor to a server's handheld during a Friday night rush.
Investor Day
Toast's inaugural Investor Day was a high-stakes storytelling challenge. I led the creative vision for the event, synthesizing complex financial data and multi-year product roadmaps into a cohesive, polished narrative for financial analysts and institutional investors.
The goal was a specific repositioning: Toast wasn't a software company for restaurants. It was the essential operating system for the entire hospitality industry. The creative made that argument.
IPO Activation
Taking a brand public on the NYSE requires more than a polished press release. I directed the creative strategy for Toast's IPO debut, bridging the gap between a playful hospitality brand and the expectations of a sophisticated financial audience.
The identity that carried us through the IPO had to work for two very different audiences at the same time: the institutional investor looking for credibility and the restaurant operator who still needed to recognize our brand.
Self-Service Brand Platform
A creative team of sixteen can't be the bottleneck for a company of 5,000. So we built the infrastructure to make that equation work.
We created a dedicated brand site and self-service platform that gave every team in the company: designers, marketers, salespeople, regional teams, the assets and guidelines they needed to stay on-brand without coming to us for every request. The platform became the operating layer of the brand.
5,000+ employees empowered
Consumer Brand
Toast's guest-facing identity presented a different kind of challenge: building a B2C brand that felt native to the diner while serving the operator's needs. We developed a visual bridge between the mobile guest experience and the restaurant's operational reality, keeping both audiences in mind without the creative feeling split.
National Restaurant Association Show
The NRA Show is the hospitality industry's biggest stage and the most competitive room you can walk into with a brand. We led the creative direction for Toast's annual presence, transforming a standard trade show footprint into a high-craft showcase: latest hardware, live software demos, and community storytelling in a physical space that matched the sophistication of our brand.
These activations broke internal records for lead generation and engagement year over year. The show became the annual proof point for how the brand lives in the real world.
Toast Go 3
Launching next-generation hardware into a crowded market requires more than a spec sheet. We led the global creative launch for Toast Go 3, focusing on what the device actually does for a server during a real shift: the physical rhythm of service, the durability that lets you stop worrying about the tool and focus on the guest.
Toast IQ
AI in the kitchen is either a useful tool or a gimmick, depending entirely on how you introduce it. We chose useful.
The launch focused on outcomes, not features: predicting prep times, reducing food waste, giving cooks their attention back. The campaign made AI feel like something an owner would actually want, not something the team built because they could.
One of Those Nights
Toast's first national broadcast campaign. We filmed a cinematic, real-time study of a complex dinner service: actors with intricate dietary needs, peak-hour chaos, a thousand small things that can go wrong. The film proved Toast's reliability by showing it under real pressure, not in ideal conditions.
The brief underneath the creative brief: don't tell operators Toast is reliable. Show them a night they recognize.
Before & After
The national campaign that served as Toast's creative blueprint for market expansion. It focused on a single emotional beat: the relief of moving from manual chaos to digital clarity.
Before and after isn't a format. It's the entire Toast value proposition. The campaign made that concrete for a national audience.
13% lift in unaided brand awareness
Building a Strategic Creative Team
The team I inherited was a service function. The team I built is a strategic partner. That shift didn't happen because I reorganized a chart. It happened because I hired people who could think in both languages: business and craft.
I grew the organization from three to sixteen by being deliberate about what each role needed to be. Not just we need a designer, but we need someone who can own the visual language of a product category and make decisions without coming back for approval on every asset.
The culture I tried to build: high standards, genuinely held. A place where people wanted to do their best work and had room to do it.
Rally for Restaurants
In 2020, when the restaurant industry was in crisis, Toast had a choice: go quiet, or show up. We showed up.
Rally for Restaurants was a community initiative that positioned Toast as the industry's advocate, not just its vendor. It was one of the most important brand moments of my tenure, not because of what it looked like but because of what it meant to the operators and restaurants we helped.
Toast on Tour
We oversee the creative for Toast's regional community events, building the kind of trust that a digital-only brand simply cannot replicate. High-touch, in-person, local.
