Slow cooked – Designing the M Restaurants website

Michelle Garnaut is a special person: a smart, independent, successful businesswoman, yet still an accessible person. The first time I met Michelle at Capital M, I immediately wanted Flow to work with her. She gave us that opportunity when her team came to us to discuss redesigning their websites.

In a time when the progression of technology changes the way we live life, it cannot come as a surprise that no matter how well a website is designed, the technology evolution and new business requirements will end up making it obsolete in time. M Restaurants came to us not knowing exactly how to articulate this or what the solution was, but through interesting and fun exploration sessions in Beijing and Shanghai we got to know the current life of M Restaurants, we rationalized M’s web infrastructure and merged their three independent sites into a single comprehensive digital platform.

Capital M Restaurants’ digital platform was launched after six months of hard work that involved every member of our team. The new look of the Capital M Restaurants’ website is a combination of responsive UX, graphic and watercolor sketches and elegant HD pictures of the classy restaurants’ interior design.

The project was delivered…late.
For us to design a good website we need input and feedback from various stakeholders on the client side: business owners, marketing team, branding team, cooks (in this case) and third party providers. This slows down the process, but is critical. The completion time was longer than expected, but we deeply enjoyed the process. With the right dose of patience, understanding and humor it turned out great! See the result of our work here.

Mrs. Garnaut is not only the head at Capital M, she is also a highly involved community member, involved in several other initiatives such as Mentor Walks Beijing and the successful Literary Festival in Shanghai- which takes place at Glam each year (and it’s about to start)- you should definitely check it out!