Website Design for Spudz Potato

Project: Web Site Design, Branding

Client: Spudz Potato, SpudzPotato.com, Robert Aguilar

Location: Oakland, CA, San Diego, CA

Tools: Photoshop, WordPress, Dreamweaver, MySQL, Bluehost, HTML, CSS

Backstory: Robert had this project rolling along in its beginning stages. They had custom cooking apparatuses manufactured, a name (Spudz Potato), a logo, an idea, a fabulous product, and a great team of help who believed in the success of the business. The business revolves around crispy, hash-brown-like potatoes mixed with other fresh, local, premium, gluten free ingredients cooked in a signature method over an open flame. Within weeks, they found themselves as some of the top vendors at 2 San Diego Farmer’s markets (Otay Ranch and Downtown San Diego). Within a month they were in 2 more. Sales are practically doubling every week at this point and the buzz is electrifying. Spudz Potato looked to DoggHouse Productions for some help designing a professional website for their business.

Robert Aguilar is one of the top auctioneers in California. The guy wears a tuxedo on a daily basis for crying out loud. When he’s not busy orchestrating commerce, he’s busy orchestrating commerce somewhere else. Often, while visiting his wife’s family in Brazil, he has noticed an incredibly delicious, crispy, “scrumptulescent” (Will Ferrell) potato dish being served on the streets. He thought to himself, “Why can’t we bring this to the States? We need to bring this to the streets of the States!” We got to talking and a hand shake formed a bond on this project.

I was working with a traveling live auction company behind the curtain. In my downtime, I’d be creating designs, graphics, and updating client’s web sites for them. The staff of auctioneers couldn’t help but notice me playing around with the Wacom tablet on a daily basis. They’d come over, crack some jokes, but eventually shoot around some ideas that they’d been kicking around. I have a habit of taking people’s ideas and pushing them into production.

SpudzPotato.com features a simple 5 page WordPress site. A place to get a sense for the identity of the founders, a calendar for upcoming appearances and opportunities to try their delicious food (both publicly and privately), a contact page, current menu, and the beginnings of a blog featuring photos of happy customers and some journal entries highlighting the behind the scenes look at their climb to success.