Client:
The McMenamins food, drink, and entertainment chain is legendary in Oregon and Washington. The company is justly famous for pioneering the Northwest microbrew-pub industry, unique historic hotel restorations, and running colorful movie theaters and concert halls.

Challenge:
For more than 20 years, McMenamins had created and maintained a popular, signature formula for selling their own brand of fun for many demographic groups. But with 52 locations and products as diverse as their countless private-label beers, wines, distilled spirits, and specialty roasted coffees, they had inadvertently created a gridlock on their corporate website. The remaking of the McMenamins website and ecommerce was a project that had been debated and avoided for years. Finally, the company issued a request for a web proposal. After reviewing local and out-of-state RFPs—which included strategies, creative, and technological capabilities—the Overland Agency was awarded the job and started work on the six-month project.

Solution:
Reshaping the company’s content was a major lift. It was strategically important to attract out-of-state visitors to the company’s many hotel properties. McMenamins had thousands of inconsistent pages representing 52 separate retail sales locations, and many different products (none of which adhered to a unified brand). At its locations, McMenamins has a successful, strong visual brand: artistic and playful with a touch of the mystic, and very Pacific Northwest. The key was to tie that into the site while providing simple, intuitive access to hotel information, movie and music performance details, and overviews of McMenamins’ approximately 100 varieties of beers, wines, spirits, and coffees.

Results:
Every aspect of McMenamins.com is now a pleasure to use—for customers and employees alike. A simple-to-use content management system (CMS) with careful built-in security features allow the home office and location managers to keep the site “branded,” while maintaining daily updates on hundreds of pieces of information about menus, room rates, show times, promotions, prices, and events. The site also has a lot of internal ad space to allow cross-promotion of locations, upcoming activities, and music events—all easily added using the CMS tool. These automatically rotating promotions provide a fresh look for frequent visitors.