Case Study
HelloFresh Owns the Creative Room
From reactive to directive: how HelloFresh
took back creative control.
01
The Challenge
Seasonal campaigns don't wait. At HelloFresh's scale, multiple markets, product lines, channels, the pressure to move fast on creative is constant. The agencies HelloFresh works with are good, and they know the business. They're also stretched across dozens of other clients, and an agency brings its own priorities alongside its perspective: the award-winning idea, the expensive production, the concept that plays well in a reel. The back-and-forth is slow, the creative cycle is labour intensive, and the momentum a seasonal calendar needs gets lost in the timeline.
At the root was a consistency problem. No outside partner, however experienced, is going to know the brand and its audience the way the people who work on it every day do. The quality of creative depended on who was in the room, how senior they were, and how much time they had that week. A good cycle produced good work. A stretched one produced work that needed rounds of fixes.
"What impressed me most was the consistency. When you're leading a marketing team, quality that depends on who's in the room isn't quality you can rely on. Savvier changed that equation. Every workflow starts from the right foundation – the research, the strategy, the creative direction – and the output reflects it. The work that comes back is strategic, on-brand, and ready – regardless of who ran it. That's what I needed."
Bart Molenda · CMO, HelloFresh
02
The Solution
Bart's team started using Savvier to do the strategic and creative work before involving anyone else.
Savvier's brand, audience, and culture workflows gave the team a clear read on who they were talking to, what was changing in the category, and where HelloFresh sat relative to each seasonal moment. That context stays with every piece of work that follows. Better understanding produced better briefs.
Every workflow was designed by a senior marketer, so the right questions, the right sequence, and the standard the work has to meet are there before anyone starts. The whole team produces better work, every cycle, regardless of who's running it.
For seasonal campaigns, that meant building a proof of concept internally, fast enough to test a direction without committing to full production. For longer-form video and content, storyboards and narratives developed in-house, built on what HelloFresh had already produced. Past campaigns feed directly into the next one, so new work builds on what actually worked rather than starting over.
And because concepts can be tested before they go anywhere, the team stopped guessing. Work goes in front of a simulated audience built from HelloFresh's real personas, and the objections come back while there's still time to fix them.
The shift wasn't about removing agencies. It was about doing more of the strategic and creative thinking inside, and giving agencies a direction to execute rather than a problem to solve.
Bart Molenda · CMO, HelloFresh
Workflows in the seasonal cycle
Brand in Culture & Trends
The cultural openings around each season, and the seasonal moments worth building a campaign around.
Audience Pains & Motivations
The real reasons people choose a meal kit, and the ones they don't say out loud.
Creative Brief
Target, insight, proposition, and tone. What the agency receives instead of an email.
Creative Campaign Development
Three campaign directions with the big idea, the manifesto, and executions across channel.
Video Script & Storyboard
Scene-by-scene storyboards and a handoff document, developed before production is booked.
Simulated Focus Group
Personas built from the real audience talk through the work, before budget is committed.
03
The Results
Every marketing team knows the gap between setting a campaign objective and arriving at a creative direction the team actually believes in. That's where time and money go, regardless of how many agencies are involved.
Time to Testable Creative Direction
Outcome → Six weeks to two
6
Weeks before
2
Weeks after
For HelloFresh, that gap used to be six weeks. Now it's two. The team arrives at every campaign cycle with a creative direction they believe in, one that's informed by what's been done before and pointed at what comes next. Getting there used to be the slow part of the whole process. Now it's where everything starts.
The team feels it too. Everyone on the team can bring their ideas to life, not just the most senior people, and before anything goes live they can test it and get feedback inside the platform.
Creative Control
Outcome → Author, not audience
The bigger shift is that HelloFresh now directs the creative process instead of reacting to it. The team used to arrive at agency meetings to review what someone else had made. Now they arrive with a point of view.
That changes the rest of the process. Concepts are more on-brand from the start because the brand developed them. Rounds are shorter because there's less to correct. The relationship with agency partners is better because HelloFresh shows up with a clear direction, not an open-ended brief. And the budget that used to go into agency concepting rounds gets put back into production, new channels, and more campaigns. HelloFresh gets more done with the same budget.
"We used to walk into agency kickoffs hoping the concepts would land. Now we walk in with a direction we've already stress-tested. The agency relationship is fundamentally different when you own the thinking."
Bart Molenda · CMO, HelloFresh
04
What's Next
HelloFresh is using Savvier across the full campaign calendar now. After every seasonal cycle, the team feeds in what worked and what didn't, so the next campaign builds on what they've learned instead of starting over. The goal is a creative process that gets better with every campaign, not just faster.
"Every campaign we run feeds the next one. We're not starting from scratch each season – we're building on what we know works and pushing into new territory. The creative gets sharper over time, not just faster."
Bart Molenda · CMO, HelloFresh