The Shelf NYC

The Shelf NYC is a discovery-first snack shop : walk in, try a snack from a brand you've never heard of, no 12-pack commitment, no guilt. "Curated for the curious, by the curious." A content audit found strong product photography but no structured story behind the brand — nothing documenting what it actually took to get from a cart to a storefront. The founder pointed to @drinksult's "Scaling SULT" series as the texture she wanted: intentional, a little chaotic, raw. That became the brief. I studied @drinksult's carousels — hook, structure, pacing, emotional beat — and found the pattern: raw iPhone shots and real supplier-chaos screenshots outbuilt polished product photography on saves. Decision: ditch the brand-shoot look for raw, in-the-moment documentation. Tested six cover directions — diary, editorial magazine, scrapbook journal, modern bold — before landing on an illustrated collage system: mixed typography, Polaroid accents, Notes-app-style textboxes. For voice, I pulled hundreds of copy samples from Sloane's own socials and locked the tone around one line: your cool friend explaining the lore behind a brand — lowercase, unfiltered, funny but confident, in her exact words. I mapped the founder's story into a seven-beat arc — the first cart, shut down by cops on day one; pop-ups through Miami and Ann Arbor; the first Shelf pop-up in Nolita; a TikTok outage that became a Hinge marketing stunt; two more pop-ups; the signed lease; a teaser for what's next. Built as a repeatable format, not a one-off — designed to keep pace with the store as it grows.