Read our case study:

The Situation

Cajé is an upscale café in Santa Barbara, California that turns into a speakeasy bar at night. Their impressive menu has earned them rave reviews for specialty drinks like “The Burnout,” a breve latte with bourbon pecan syrup and activated charcoal, garnished with ginger salt, candied ginger, and a blackberry.

The Problem

With its red-tile roofs and surf-ready beaches, Santa Barbara is a scenic coastal town popular with both tourists and day trippers from Los Angeles. On average, the town sees an influx of more than 7.2 million visitors each year.

Despite the rave reviews, Cajé’s owners believed they were not seeing the foot traffic they should be getting. Contributing to the problem, visitors tend to congregate at the beaches and in the downtown promenade, and Cajé is off the beaten track. Additionally, there are a number of well-established competitors, including other highly rated local coffee roasters and national chains.

Luminaite was hired to solve their foot traffic problem and capture more of the market share Cajé was missing out on.

"LUMINAITE solved Our problem!"

The Solution

After a strategic analysis and some in-market testing, we were confident we could help them achieve their goals and set a plan in place. However, within a week of our campaign launch, Covid-19 hit California, causing severe restrictions on tourism and indoor dining.

Cajé is a 4th-wave coffee shop, and one of their differentiators is the sensual experience of gourmet lattes served in crystal cocktail glasses, and garnished with chocolates and fruits. With indoor dining closed, and most businesses shut down, the expectation was that Cajé would suffer a loss of business (one longstanding competitor in the downtown promenade closed permanently).

But instead of cancelling the campaign, our Luminaite team saw this as an opportunity. We pivoted our messaging, shifted ad spends, and used precise targeting to captivate new audiences using geofencing, email, social media, and display ads.

Within a week, traffic had increased to pre-covid levels, and within a month, we had achieved a new record for foot traffic that was 33% higher than Cajé’s all time record.