FOOD • BEVERAGE • HOSPITALITY • PERSONAL CARE

Branding and strategy for small businesses ready to grow.

Stack of Portland-made spice blends

Gardenia Creative is a boutique creative agency rooted in Portland, Oregon—one of the country's most fertile scenes for independent food, beverage, and hospitality brands. We partner with established businesses across the U.S. to take their marketing and digital presence to new heights.

You’ve put in the hard work. We help you look the part.

Our clients aren't starting from scratch. They've built real businesses—loyal customers, amazing product, hard-earned reputation—and they're ready for branding that reflects where they're going, not just where they've been.

Ready to Rebrand

Your brand has been with you since the beginning. It's time for an identity that matches the business you've become.

Ready to Go Pro

You built it yourself, and you know your audience. Now you want a brand that looks as good as your products or services actually are.

Ready to Scale

You're growing into new markets, new channels, new audiences. Your brand and marketing strategy need to lead the way.

Ready for a New Website

Your site isn't doing your brand justice. Let's build one that converts visitors into customers and reflects who you really are.

Recent Work

Full-service creative for food, beverage, hospitality, and personal care brands.

We're a small, senior team—which means every project gets our best thinking, not a junior hand-off. We work across brand strategy, packaging design, website design, copywriting, and marketing strategy, and we use smart tools and modern workflows to move faster and go deeper than a boutique agency traditionally could.

The result: creative work that looks and performs at an agency level, at pricing that makes sense for a growing independent business.

  • What are you all about? How do you do it differently from all the rest? What problem do you solve for people? We’ll uncover the answers to these questions and bring your brand to life.

  • Showcase your business online with a stunning, yet action-inducing website or online store. We create compelling, data-driven work that reflects your brand, connects with audiences, and leads to repeatable results.

  • From email and print pieces to entire websites, we can put words on the page that communicate clearly and effectively to inspire action. We'll work within existing brand guidelines or help you develop your unique voice and vocabulary. We leverage data for guidance to improve visibility and maximize impact.

  • Whether you’re bringing a new product to market or refreshing a shelf staple, our team is steeped in years of experience designing labels, mailers, multi-pack boxes, and more.

  • In a digital world, print marketing materials still have a place! From direct mail to brochures, promotional merchandise and other swag, we’ll develop the design, pick out the materials, and find a vendor to make it all come to fruition.

  • It’s not enough to simply be present online. If you want to be found amidst the sea of searchable content, a strategy is critical. Together with our SEO strategists, we’ll assess the digital landscape around your space and create a roadmap for optimal positioning and content creation.

  • Brand continuity is essential to building trust with your audience. Using your brand guidelines as a lens, we'll direct the creation of fresh assets that perfectly align with your company's distinct personality.

  • Laurel is an integral part of our team. She has helped tremendously with copywriting branding guides, product descriptions and scents, email marketing and optimizing blogs and website copy for SEO. Laurel is extremely efficient, requires minimal management and always goes above and beyond what is asked of her. The entire team enjoys working with her!

    –Kristen Murphy, Director of Marketing, Humble Brands

  • Gardenia Creative was able to transform disparate ideas and brief glimpses of our vision into a cohesive brand identity. My hopes became realities in how we convey who we are, what our purpose is and what we do. For synthesizing our brand voice, for coaching me through the challenges, for listening to my whims and making them feasible, I will forever be grateful and in awe of the work that Gardenia does and continues to deliver regularly. They are the embodiment of creative collaboration and undoubtedly, they are the team you need for your business.

    – Mailynh Phan, CEO, RD Winery Napa

  • Laurel and the entire team at Gardenia Creative have been such a critical part of our growth and success as an emerging brand. The GC team developed our stunning branding and packaging designs working both with our vision AND their industry expertise to elevate our final products beyond what we could envision. Additionally, the GC team created our brand guide, which has been the foundation for every physical and digital asset we have created and guides the mission, vision and strategy of the business. This guide represents the identity of our company and something every business should invest in.

    – Rebecca Christiansen, Co-Founder, Portland Salt Co.

We know your industry.

We've spent decades working in the food, beverage, hospitality, and personal care industries, where authenticity isn't a buzzword; it's the product. We understand the difference between a winery rebrand and a craft RTD launch, between a lodge's seasonal needs and a hotel group's brand architecture, between a clean beauty refresh and a functional personal care new product launch.

That fluency shows in the work—and it means we spend less time getting up to speed and more time getting it right.

Let’s talk. Most of our best client relationships started with a 30-minute call. No pressure, no pitch—just a conversation about where your brand is and where you want it to go.