# Portfolio Case Study — Dave's Maine Café Local Legend System

## The brief

Build a cultural system for a family-run Route 1 café that people would want to recognize, repeat, and share—not a jingle, a stack of posts, or a cosmetic rebrand.

## The raw material

Dave's already had the ingredients agencies usually invent:

- a real owner with a point of view;
- a Maine lobster shack / roadhouse identity;
- named weekly specials;
- fresh-picked food and a deep bar program;
- a Route 1 location;
- family-run hospitality;
- language with bite: butter-fueled, bourbon-powered, lobster-loaded.

The opportunity was coherence. Each ingredient needed to reinforce the others until the week itself became branded memory.

## The system built

### 1. A world

The website establishes the visual and verbal grammar: roadside signage, paper and ink, lobster red, bourbon gold, Maine forest and navy, direct useful copy, and the scooter-lobster mascot.

### 2. A soundtrack

`Route 1 Good Trouble` is six compact original songs plus a continuous café mix. Each song owns a recurring moment; one guitar-and-stomp identity ties the record together.

### 3. A ritual calendar

Dave's Day, Shell Yeah Wednesday, It's Thursday, Bugs & Bourbon Friday, Sweet Detour, and Everyone Needs a Dave each have a room cue, staff line, physical touch, capture rule, and metric.

### 4. A content organism

Each ritual creates an invitation, a real-world proof, and a memory artifact. One phone capture feeds vertical video, story, carousel, email/SMS, and the next ritual invitation.

### 5. An in-room operating system

The system tells staff what to cue, say, show, capture, and count while protecting service, guest consent, and conversational volume.

### 6. A learning loop

Recognition, repeat behavior, transmission, operational fit, and commercial contribution decide what grows. Silence and friction cause rituals to be repaired or retired.

### 7. A trust layer

Real business imagery is separated from AI illustration. Generated music has plans, candidates, critiques, mastering receipts, and hashes. Volatile facts are flagged. Outcome claims are prohibited until measured.

## Deliverables

- current brand website;
- six-song brand album and full café mix;
- 6s, 15s, and 30s sonic cutdowns;
- weekly ritual architecture;
- 90-day campaign calendar;
- content capture and distribution system;
- in-room staff playbook;
- six social campaign cards;
- weekly ritual board and album table tent;
- measurement and experiment plan;
- rights/provenance statement;
- public portfolio experience and downloadable package.

## What this proves today

- A local business can be expressed coherently across web, music, visual design, campaigns, physical rituals, and operations.
- The production stack can generate multiple candidates, select blind, repair, master, package, and publish.
- The result can preserve a specific owner/place voice instead of collapsing into generic “small business content.”
- The system includes the operating and measurement layer needed to test commercial value honestly.

## What remains unproven

- revenue lift;
- foot-traffic lift;
- repeat-visit lift;
- follower or reach growth;
- guest adoption of ritual names;
- staff adoption and operational burden;
- Dave's testimonial or referral willingness.

Those are not omissions to hide. They are the next experiment.

## Portfolio principle

The art is not decoration around the business. The art is the mechanism by which the business becomes easier to remember, easier to repeat, and more meaningful to belong to.
