One of the Mornington Peninsula’s most iconic and loved attractions.

The situation

Sunny Ridge strawberry farm is one of Australia’s largest strawberry producers and one of Victoria’s biggest tourist attractions. They entice visitors from all around the world with their u-pick strawberry experience and their famous strawberry themed café.

In 2017, Oraco was engaged to complete a Social Media Strategy. Sunny Ridge had a range of audiences to communicate with, including people of all ages based locally as well as visitors from around the nation and overseas travellers. Due to limited internal resources, Sunny Ridge’s online presence had often been neglected up until this point, and their collateral and packaging was inconsistent. We presented an important opportunity to further grow the brand and increase sentiment.

Our solution

We implemented the Social Media Strategy and took on the management of Sunny Ridge’s Instagram, Facebook, Google My Business and Trip Advisor. We continued to run these accounts until mid-2020.

During this time, we managed Sunny Ridge’s online accounts during the 2018 Australian strawberry contamination crisis, helped to create a successful school holiday program, coordinated each new seasonal menu launch, coordinated influencer partnerships and built a wealth of user-generated content (UGC) across all social channels with more than 6k pieces of content on Instagram alone.

In early 2018, we were asked to design and develop a new eCommerce website. Their previous website had eCommerce functionality, however, it was outdated and not generating the online sales they were after. In addition to this, making changes or content updates was difficult and costly. Oraco developed a new responsive WordPress-powered website with a modern, easy to navigate, online store.

In 2019, we established The Strawberry Scoop, a monthly email marketing activity that enabled Sunny Ridge to communicate with their online community about things that were happening at the farm, recipes and special offers. In just over a year, we built this list to more than 2k subscribers and were able to attribute regular monthly online sales as a result of this communication.

After evolving its digital presence, Sunny Ridge recognised that there were inconsistencies with its branding and that it had not been updated in some time. They were ready for an overhaul. To maintain recognition, it was decided that the original logo would be maintained and the overall brand look and feel evolved.

Taking into consideration that their audience is widely families with children, it was important that the new Sunny Ridge branding was fun and playful, with a sense of excitement and adventure. It had to be vibrant to reflect the look and taste of berries, and also be flexible for use across their packaging and their online presence.

After extensive research and concept development, the final decision was made to utilise modern and abstract shapes and patterns – Large blocks of colour with overlapping graphic elements representing strawberries. This concept took on the overall look and feel for the brand with the primary colour being pink. Pink not only perfectly reflects strawberries, it’s also a fun, vibrant and inspiring colour for families, while romantic and warm for couples visiting the farm on a special date.

The brand was fleshed out further for the packaging of products using alternative fruits. Additional shapes and patterns were created for raspberries, blueberries and blackberries, as well as accompanying secondary colours.

Once the Sunny ridge branding was finalised, Oraco rolled it out across Sunny Ridge’s corporate stationery, marketing collateral, packaging, signage and online presence.

The results

Their new WordPress-powered website is generating regular online sales, and updates and changes are simple to make, even for their in-house team.

We continue to manage Sunny Ridge’s social media presence and website. We also assist with ad hoc content creation and branding projects when required.