Stride Serves Featured in Suburban Life Magazine

When we launched Stride Serves earlier this year, the idea behind it was pretty simple: restaurants have a lot more to share than what’s on the plate.

After years of working with restaurants and hospitality businesses through Stride Strategy, we kept coming back to the same thing. The brands that people connect with most aren’t necessarily the ones posting the most polished food photos. They’re the ones giving people a reason to care about the restaurant behind them.

That thinking ultimately became Stride Serves, our hospitality-focused division built around one idea: Connecting Beyond the Food.

Recently, Suburban Life Magazine gave us the opportunity to share that story.

Why We Created Stride Serves

Restaurants have always been some of our favorite businesses to work with.

There is so much happening beyond the food itself. There’s the owner who took a chance opening their first restaurant. The chef who has been making the same dish for 20 years. The staff members customers know by name. The regulars who have been coming in every Friday night for years.

Those are the things that make a restaurant feel like your restaurant.

They’re also the stories that can easily get lost when marketing becomes a constant cycle of food photos, specials and promotions.

Stride Serves grew out of our desire to approach restaurant marketing differently.

Of course, great photography matters. Promotions matter. Advertising matters. But those pieces become much more powerful when people understand who they’re supporting and what makes that business different.

Sometimes that means putting a microphone on an owner and letting them tell a story. Sometimes it’s introducing the person who’s been behind the bar for a decade. Other times, it’s simply capturing the little things that regular customers already love about a place.

Our job is to find those moments and help restaurants turn them into content people actually want to watch, read and share.

Connecting Beyond the Food

“Connecting Beyond the Food” isn’t just a tagline we came up with for Stride Serves. It’s really the reason the division exists.

Independent restaurants are competing for attention every day, often against businesses with much larger marketing budgets. Trying to win that battle by simply posting more isn’t always realistic, and frankly, it isn’t particularly interesting either.

What independent restaurants do have is something the bigger brands can’t manufacture: their own story.

That’s where we believe there’s an opportunity.

We want to help restaurants build recognizable brands around the people, history, personality and experiences that make them worth visiting in the first place. Then we support that storytelling with the strategy, content and advertising needed to actually get it in front of people.

It’s an approach we’ve been developing through our restaurant work for years, and Stride Serves gives us the opportunity to take it even further.

A Story Worth Sharing

Building Stride Strategy has always been closely tied to working with small businesses. Stride Serves is an extension of that, focused on an industry filled with independent owners who put an incredible amount of themselves into what they build.

Seeing that idea featured in Suburban Life Magazine so soon after officially launching the division is pretty special for us.

We’re grateful to Jenny Graham and the Suburban Life team for taking the time to learn about what we’re building and, more importantly, why we’re building it.

Stride Serves was created around the belief that every restaurant has a story worth telling.

This time, we got the chance to tell ours.

Read the full Suburban Life Magazine feature, A Flavor for Storytelling.