What began in one small ‘Warung’ street-side kitchen in Surabaya is now being enjoyed by millions all over Indonesia and now opening across Australia and in Europe.

Background

Hospitality brands need to continually deliver and excite their customers' tastes and whet their palate if they want to succeed. It's about keeping them engaged, providing more reasons than not to want to come back and spend more frequently. For Ayam Penyet RIA, a household hospitality brand in Indonesia, they realised they needed to adapt to the changing tastes and preferences of international markets, such as Australia, if they wanted to succeed.

Ayam Penyet RIA began as a small “warung” or street-side kitchen, run by a legendary lady in the late 90’s. She was very traditional and word spread quickly of her signature dish, Smashed Fried Chicken. The concept grew very quickly and before long, the brand popped up in many hometowns and cities all over Indonesia, with her trademark smiling face positioned as the brand icon. As the business grew, it transformed into a franchise for the local Indonesian market.

Our Approach

Hana’s vision was to take a progressive approach while keeping the heritage of the brand equally weighted. Taking the vision as the brief, BrandWorks was engaged to work together with RIA’s team to retell their story, position the brand as a contemporary new Asian eatery concept and freshen up its name, brand identity, store interior design and customer experience all in one.

“It's great that we can really present Indonesia in a good way. I'm really proud of the brand; from the design to interiors and the food that we offer.”

The result is a modern and young brand that stays true to its roots and background. Simplifying the name to RIA, it’s sophisticated and up-to-date yet proud of its Indonesian origins since ‘98. New customers are invited to learn of its story of passed-down recipes from Hana’s Mum and to taste their signature favourites while spreading the good word about Indonesian cuisine.

“We've got so many local customers from day one, which is so interesting. This is the one good direction that we are doing right now; we really attract a lot of local Australians (on top of Asian customers).”

The Outcome

The rebrand and new store design have helped RIA reposition itself and attract both local Indonesians and a new Australian market. From the day of opening RIA’s Randwick store, the venue has experienced record numbers of customers and queues lining up outside. Local residents to ministers and dignitaries from the Indonesian Embassy are regular RIA patrons and the venue has now become the unofficial destination for authentic Indonesian cuisine.

“Thank you so much for all the hard work and the amazing design. Everyone is amazed and did not expect that a traditional Indonesian restaurant could have an eye-catching and impactful interior design. BrandWorks is the best discovery we have ever had!”

Confident of the brand’s transformation, Hana and her team are excited to now look for further opportunities to expand. They have since secured funding from a venture capital fund and are in a strong position to scale and grow, even despite the challenging economic climate. By 2021, RIA has in its pipeline to open 7 new stores across Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, and in the not too distant future, Amsterdam. With an estimated Indonesian community of 1.5 million and with only around 50 Indonesian restaurants in the country, expansion into Northern Europe is just around the corner.

“Sometimes when you grow too quickly, you can go down quickly as well, and I don't want that to happen. We've now got a really good team of people who really work with us and they know what they're doing, so it gives me confidence.”

Finding the right partners in operations, capital and creativity who understand their vision is the main key to expansion in Hana’s eyes. As RIA’s brand guardian, BrandWorks role is to ensure that the brand lives on and is aligned with all the right touchpoints and their story is told, so they can focus more on growth and scale into new markets.

More Results

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 severely impacted the entire Hospitality sector and RIA is no exception to that. It forced Hana to adopt a new business model that she never tried on before. She started looking at technology, digital marketing and online ordering to build up its customer database by engaging more online.

“We realised that during COVID, we got way more orders and revenue than when we opened the shop as normal. I think that's really what we learned from the pandemic; to open our eyes to see that there’s more market out there. We were too busy in the shop doing the day-to-day, without really looking into what we can do outside of this restaurant until it hit us.”

What started out as a simple Whatsapp group chat to take orders very soon grew to a point where the number of orders each day became too overwhelming. RIA quickly set up a Shopify store as their eCommerce platform and all of a sudden, they turned into a food delivery business and customer loyalty platform. 

As of the time of writing this, RIA has organically grown a strong following of more than 5K on Instagram, built up its digital marketing capabilities with its own customer database platform and is now set to grow exponentially as they expand into new territories and markets.

All this in just 6 months.