Supporting the evolution of Wild Mountain from pop-up to Sooke staple
Client showcase
Brooke and Oliver’s passion for food shines through everything they do. Whether it’s the pure joy you experience when you take a bite of one of their dishes, or the way they can tell you about the latest update on how the farmer, fishers, forager or makers that they used to make the food - everything they touch is clearly shaped by their unwavering passion for supporting local. For these these two, supporting local as a business owner is about supporting the local food system, and recognizing that we can choose to reject the food system that makes it cheaper and easier to buy something shipped half way across the world.
Chaime has been proud to be there since the start, thinking together with Brooke and Oliver about how to best leverage technology to support their business and spread the word about their love of local.
“Chaime is a joy to collaborate with! My husband and I, a chef and sommelier, are not tech savvy. Jen was able to interpret our needs with a specific and visual representation of ourselves. She not only created several beautiful and easily useable websites for us, she also helped us curate an online presence through various platforms that felt comfortable and genuine. ”
Chaime began working with Wild Mountain in 2013, long before running a restaurant was even a glimmer in their eye. Together with Full Plate Digital, we strategized about how to use social media to spread the word about the pop up farm-to-table they were running on their off days from Sooke Harbour House.
When the opportunity to open their own place arose in 2015, we worked together again, this time helping them migrate to Squarespace, giving them more control over their content and an opportunity create a guide to other small businesses in Sooke to share with folks visiting the area.
This site grew nicely alongside the restaurant until 2020, when their creativity and innovation was put to the test like all other restauranteurs by the global pandemic. We worked together to launch an online store with Square, enabling them to continue to support their network of local makers, and launch a take-and-bake program so that their loyal customers could still get a taste of their favourite spot through the worst of things.
As things began to open up, Square continued to allow them to take contactless payments and expand into take out including selling pizza from their other pandemic project, a wood-fired pizza oven.
In 2021, it was time for a website makeover! Working together Sooke artist Jeannine Saylor, Chaime took illustrations of the local flora and fauna that is served so lovingly in the restaurant and brought them into their digital presence. With the final touches - a custom font of Brooke’s handwriting that adorns the daily menus and a little bit of animation to bring life to Jeannine’s illustrations we created that helps diners get a feel for the hand-crafted nature of the restaurant before they even visit for the first time.
“This partnership with Wild Mountain represents perfectly of the kind of project we love sinking our teeth into here at Chaime (no pun intended!). We have used a variety of technologies over the years to help support the vision that Brooke and Oliver have for supporting creating long-term, community-centered change - in this case in our food systems!”