Mei Mei
Dumplings
Brand Systems
New England / 2022
Overview
Mei Mei Dumplings is a woman-owned, farm-focused food company rooted in New England’s local food community.
Between Projects’ first client engagement focused on helping Mei Mei clarify its brand and build a practical marketing strategy for its next stage of growth. The business was preparing to fully transition to the Mei Mei Dumplings name while expanding across farmers markets, retail, wholesale, classes, catering, and direct-to-consumer sales.
The challenge was to create one coherent system that could hold all of that growth together.
Challenge
A growing business needed a clearer story and a more connected marketing plan.
Mei Mei already had a strong point of view: locally sourced ingredients, inventive dumplings, deep community relationships, and a playful, human personality.
What it needed was a framework that could translate those strengths consistently across brand, packaging, digital communications, farmers markets, retail, fundraising, and new revenue streams.
The work needed to answer two questions at once:
What does Mei Mei stand for?
and
How should the business take that story to market?
Brand Strategy
Good food in every sense of the word.
The brand strategy centered Mei Mei around the idea that good food should taste good, feel good, and do good.
The framework defined the company as woman-owned, farm-focused, uniquely New England, and deeply connected to its community of employees, customers, farmers, vendors, and other small businesses. The brand voice was designed to remain warm, real, trustworthy, playful, and distinctly human.
That thinking was distilled into a simple brand idea:
We support our community by creating uniquely delicious dumplings that bring surprise, delight, and joy to the table.
The strategy also established the foundation for how that identity should show up across packaging, web, messaging, and other brand applications.
Marketing Strategy
Connect awareness, access, and purchase.
The marketing strategy translated the brand into a practical growth plan across Mei Mei’s major business priorities.
The work addressed:
- more than 30 regional farmers markets
- the Boston retail rollout
- wholesale growth
- direct-to-consumer sales
- fundraising
- classes, events, and catering
- owned media across web, email, and social
- earned media through PR and influencers
- paid media through a test-and-learn approach
- measurement and ongoing optimization
Rather than treating those channels independently, the plan organized them into connected campaign funnels spanning awareness, engagement, conversion, and repeat purchase.
For farmers markets, that meant combining earned media, influencers, email, social, landing pages, and targeted paid media to build awareness and drive pre-orders and market traffic. For retail, the same framework shifted toward store discovery, in-store presence, demos, and clear “where to find” communications.
Digital Foundation
The strategy also identified the website as the center of Mei Mei’s marketing system.
Rather than functioning primarily as a brand brochure, the site needed to become the hub connecting product education, e-commerce, farmers markets, retail locations, events, and direct sales. The plan recommended clearer pathways for finding Mei Mei in market and retail environments, stronger storytelling, and more purposeful conversion points throughout the experience.
Outcome
A brand and marketing framework built for the next stage of growth.
The engagement gave Mei Mei a clearer articulation of who it was, how it should sound, what made it distinct, and how its brand could support a rapidly expanding business.
Just as importantly, it connected that identity to a practical marketing system spanning farmers markets, retail, digital channels, earned media, paid media, and customer retention.
For Between Projects, it was the first expression of an approach that would become central to the studio’s work: start with the brand, understand the business system around it, and build the marketing architecture from there.