Home Bistro
Modernizing a gourmet meal-delivery business, top to bottom.
Home Bistro had been shipping handcrafted, gourmet frozen meals direct to consumers since 1999 — one of the few in the space without a subscription model. They had a loyal customer base and a problem common to long-running businesses: a legacy stack that couldn't take them anywhere new. The mandate was to modernize the brand, the technology, and the operations together — not one at a time.
- Role
- VP, Marketing & E-commerce
- Year
- 2021
- Industry
- Direct-to-Consumer Food
Highlights
- 013%+ conversion rate after replatforming
- 02IBM AS400 retired in favor of NetSuite ERP
- 03Full rebrand and visual modernization
- 04Multi-channel digital marketing operation built from scratch
- 05Data-driven customer segmentation
- 06Just-in-time fulfillment streamlined with suppliers
The Challenge
A loyal brand stuck at the ceiling of its own infrastructure.
Home Bistro had something most D2C brands would kill for: a customer base that had been with them for years. They also had something most D2C brands have outgrown by that point — an IT stack built around an IBM AS400 ERP, a legacy website that wasn't built for paid acquisition or experimentation, and supplier relationships that weren't yet wired into the business as true operational partners.
Growing past the loyal base meant attracting new customers, and attracting new customers meant becoming a brand that looked, performed, and operated like the modern direct-to-consumer brands the new audience was used to. None of that was possible on the existing stack.
The Approach
Rebuild the brand, the stack, and the operation together.
We ran the modernization as a single integrated program rather than three separate ones. The rebrand sharpened the positioning and refreshed the visual identity. The e-commerce replatform — onto a modern stack with proper analytics — finally exposed the customer behavior data the marketing team had been flying blind without. With that data, we built a real growth marketing operation: SEM, social, influencer and affiliate partnerships, Google Ads, Facebook, Microsoft Ads.
In parallel, we replaced the AS400 ERP with NetSuite, brought product photography in-house to keep up with content demand, and worked closely with food suppliers and 3PL partners to rebuild just-in-time fulfillment as a deliberate capability — not a workaround.
The Outcome
A modern D2C operation with measurable performance.
Conversion settled above 3%. Bounce rate and cart abandonment improved. Time-on-site and engagement metrics moved with them. More importantly, Home Bistro now operates like a modern D2C business — paid acquisition is actually working, the data layer supports real segmentation, and the supply chain is set up to handle growth instead of bottlenecking it.
Stack
