Kickoff (January)
This year's Kickoff theme was "farm to bag". We wanted something more specific though as this has been a common theme in a lot of restaurants. We thought about what it takes for one single order to be processed - from the farm all the way until it get's in the bag and given to the customer. What does that journey look like and who all is involved? We decided to take the attendees through a visual journey of what they may look like for one specific order.
We typically do a big opening number to kickoff the conference, so we decided to create a piece that supports our themed story and take the audience on a short but stylized journey through the process.
Franchisee Conference (May)
The Franchisee Conference brings in people from all over the world: general, distric and regional managers, franchisee owners, coorporate employees and vendors. This year we had over 1200 people in attendance and felt like it was our most successful event to date with Five Guys.
We extend the theme from the Kickoff and make some adjustments to make it work with a new a much wider footprint. We usually will tweak a few things in fabrication to ensure that all of our designed artwork will fit and placed correctly within any venue our client chooses.
Similar to the Kickoff - we do a big opening number to really get the audience excited and ready for what's to come. This year we produced a music video with one of our production partners, Tacklebox Films. As the music video comes to an end we brought a high school band from Washington D.C. to come out and join in with the musical track.
Five Guys Games (May)
Every two years Five Guys does a big competition involving all of the American stores. It starts with 50,000 competitors and dwindles down to 8 finalists who end up competiting in front of the whole conference for over $50,000. The competition consists of cheese seperation, quality control and potato cutting. In the past, we had a section for meat prep but this process has been updated and automated. With that update we were given a challenge to rebuild the competition as a whole and to create more excitement around the whole event.
What we came up with was a competition that was American Ninja Warrior meets restaurant prep. We built a bracket style competition that was single elimination based and the heats would be continuous - meaning you better be in shape. The results that came out of our "new look" Games were absolute homeruns. Out of the 12 years of competition - we were told this was the best one by far and that is something we're proud of.
