Evan’s Rockin’ Hot Sauce is an approachable, fun-loving hot sauce built with a DIY-spirit and an understated obsession with quality.
Bleachers saxophonist Evan Smith is a touring musician with a background in kitchens who came to us to help take his indie hot sauce side project to the next level. He’d been making sauce and selling it at the band’s merch table, hand-labeling on the road using stick-on labels and a Sharpie. He came to us wanting a brand that stayed true to those roots but elevated to its own well-deserved rock-and-roll status.
We took inspiration from Evan’s handwritten labels and his love for the ✨ emoji and built a brand that feels fresh and vibrant and, most importantly, true to its backstage beginnings. Deepened with pattern and ingredient-focused iconography, the brand we designed keeps the promise on the label: “no weird stuff.”
We were able to spice up Evan’s home-grown sauce brand and create an online platform that brings the heat.
First Pier finds important parts of my brand's identity and translates them perfectly into visual language. Thorough and creative, they take pieces that I've made and show me them in a different way without generating a whole new identity.
Evan Smith, President — Evan's Rockin' Hot Sauce
Evan Smith was managing his hot sauce brand's web tools and marketing entirely on his own when he reached out to First Pier. What he got back was a transformed digital presence: a rebuilt Shopify store, refined brand identity, simplified backend, cleaner fulfillment operations, and a 85–100% increase in revenue. All for around $5,000. The key was First Pier's ability to find the parts of a brand that already matter and surface them in a way the founder couldn't see on his own. That's the job — and they did it without reinventing who Evan's Rockin' Hot Sauce already was.
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