Pie Square Brand Launch
A loud launch for a food brand nobody had heard of.
Pie Square set out to bring deep dish pies to Adelaide. One catch; most people had no idea what a deep dish pie was.
Explaining a new restaurant idea is usually a careful job - especially in a market like Adelaide. Usually, you start by reassuring people and comparing it to something familiar to build initial trust. We did the opposite.
We bet that the fastest way to make a strange new pie feel like a must-try was to build a brand with so much personality that people came for the character and stayed for the food. The one familiar reference point; that it's pizza-adjacent, was all the reassurance we'd lean on.
The mascot is a lumpy, faintly stressed square face that is reminiscent of ambiguous melted stuff. We’d personally call it absolutely disgusting, which is exactly the vibe we were hoping for. It anchors an identity built on bold yellow and red, hand-drawn food characters, checkerboard everything, and a voice that refuses to take itself seriously. The menu introduces itself as "deep-dish pies and other things we probably shouldn't make.”
We carried the same energy into a full website build. Loud, fast and chaotic on the surface, with grumpy little food characters scattered everywhere - but underneath, a clean, simple site that gets people from curious to ordering without a fuss.
That voice runs right down to the menu items. Baba Ga Mush. Pepa-Peno. Pina Babe. Getting Brisky. Not a Reuben. The jokes do real work: they make a brand-new format feel approachable and fun rather than unfamiliar and risky. You don't need to know what deep-dish is to want a "Pina Babe."
Then came the part with the most room to grow; the content.
Pie Square lives online, so we gave it a social presence that talks like the internet. Instead of polished food promos, we made memes - the kind of posts people actually share.
They're deliberately stoopid, and they worked.
The clearest proof was the simplest post of all: a cold open of the shopfront door swinging open, nothing else. It pulled around 80,000 views on Instagram; an enormous number for a single-venue local restaurant, off the back of a five-second clip.
To bring it into the real world, we hosted an opening night at 258 Pulteney Street and ran it end to end - on-site branding, video and photography, and the flow of the night itself.
We partnered with Media Salt to invite local influencers, set the room up so it was easy (and tempting) to film in, and left each of them a personalised, on-brand "Reserved" card at their table - a small touch that made people feel looked after and, not by accident, made a lovely piece of content in its own right.
For a brand that started from scratch, selling a food most people had never heard of, Pie Square now has a loud, recognisable identity, a real online following, and a growing habit of getting Adelaide to try something new.
