Jo’s Kitchen Catering Co.
Jo's Kitchen is an East Lothian-based catering company with a reputation built entirely on the quality of the food and the care behind it. Jo and her team cater for weddings, corporate functions and private dining events across Scotland; working at venues including Newhall Estate, Dunglass Estate, Cairns Farm Estate, Bachilton Barn and Winton Castle among others — using locally sourced, seasonal ingredients and bespoke menus tailored to each occasion.
The business has been recognised at award level, winning the Scottish Wedding Awards Caterer category and receiving highly commended recognition from Confetti, with the website and customer experience specifically noted as part of what sets Jo's Kitchen apart. It is also listed and recommended across several of Scotland's leading wedding directories.
Alongside the events and catering side of the business, Jo's Kitchen sells home cooked food directly to customers — frozen meals available year-round, Friday Feasts as themed weekly sets, Christmas dinner orders seasonally and gift vouchers throughout.
Studio Creates has supported the business across brand, website and digital marketing over a number of years, through several distinct phases of development.
The brand
Jo arrived with an existing identity that had the right foundations but needed refining and extending to work properly across an increasingly wide range of touchpoints. The refresh brought greater consistency and polish to the visual identity — ensuring that everything from the website through to downloadable catering brochures and email communications felt professionally branded and coherent.
That elevation across every customer touchpoint matters considerably for a catering business operating at a premium level. A prospective wedding couple downloading a pricing brochure or receiving a follow-up email forms an impression of Jo's Kitchen before any conversation takes place. The brand now carries the same care and attention throughout that Jo brings to the food itself.
The website: Phase one
The initial build was a clean Squarespace brochure site: clear service information across wedding catering, corporate catering and private dining, with an easy route to making contact. It gave Jo's Kitchen a professional digital home that reflected the quality of the business and could be found by the couples and event organisers searching for catering in East Lothian and across Scotland.
As the ecommerce opportunity became clear — particularly during the pandemic period, when events had paused but appetite for quality home cooked food had not — the site evolved to accommodate online ordering for frozen meals, Friday Feasts, Christmas dinners and gift vouchers. That online sales channel has continued to perform strongly since, with delivery scoped to East Lothian and order management handled directly through the platform.
Restructuring for growth: Phase two
As the business developed and priorities shifted back toward events and catering, the site underwent a more comprehensive overhaul. Navigation was restructured to reflect how the business actually operated — wedding catering, corporate catering and private dining each with their own clear pathways, sample menus and venue information. The ready meals offering was reorganised under a dedicated Quick Food section, keeping the ecommerce capability intact while ensuring it didn't dilute the premium catering positioning.
New venues were added and outdated references removed. Testimonials were refreshed throughout. A dedicated FAQ page was developed and linked from catering pages. Downloadable catering brochures were introduced with a form-gated mechanism for wedding and events enquiries. Sample menus were expanded to include dietary variations. The contact form was refined to capture more useful information — guest numbers, approximate timings — from the outset of an enquiry.
All of this was done with the user journey in mind, reducing friction for prospective clients while giving Jo better quality enquiry information from the start.
Email marketing and automation
The most transformative phase of the work was building a fully integrated email marketing and automation system. The initial setup used Mailchimp, but as the ecommerce and enquiry management needs grew, the email marketing was migrated into Squarespace Campaigns — allowing the platform, the ecommerce activity and the email communications to operate as a single joined-up system.
The automation work addressed a specific operational challenge that any growing catering business faces. Wedding couples, corporate clients and event organisers all want pricing information before committing to a conversation — but releasing that information without capturing contact details and following up systematically meant opportunities were being lost.
The solution was a gated brochure download. Prospective clients enter their details to access the catering pricing brochure, which automatically triggers a tailored follow-up sequence. Wedding enquiries receive a wedding-specific flow. Corporate and events enquiries receive their own. Both sequences provide relevant information progressively, encourage a call and follow up at the right intervals — without requiring manual intervention each time.
A welcome flow for new newsletter sign-ups runs alongside these sequences, giving new subscribers a considered introduction to the business and its offering rather than simply dropping them into a broadcast list.
The commercial impact has been meaningful. The cost of converting new catering enquiries has reduced. The experience for prospective clients has improved. And the time Jo and the team spend on manual follow-up has come down — allowing more focus on what the business does best.
Recognition
Jo's Kitchen has won the Scottish Wedding Awards Caterer category and received highly commended recognition from Confetti, with judges specifically noting the website and user experience as part of what distinguished the business. That recognition reflects what good digital infrastructure produces over time — when every touchpoint feels considered and professional, from the first search result to the brochure download to the follow-up email, the cumulative effect on how a business is perceived is significant.
Studio Creates has been part of building that infrastructure and continues to support the business as it grows.
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