Best Friend Client (BFC) appreciation post of the week! This time celebrating The Lemon Perfect Company and its fearless, energetic, relentlessly motivating captain Yanni Hufnagel.
**Reminder BFCs are our Best Friend Clients — something Jiffy Iuen and I internally coined over the years at Frank Collective. These are clients you love and instantly feel bonded with, working to achieve a shared vision. You feel like you can lock arms and scale any mountain together as a team.
Yanni first met with us at Frank back in the early days of the LA office — when we were in a very small co-working space in the Arts District. I didn't meet him at first, as I was based out of the NY office mostly — but I soon heard from Jiffy and Mitchell Orkis that there was a potential new brand identity job for a cold-pressed lemon water that was pre-formulation, in its seed round of funding, and the founder was "hyped!" to say the least 😆 . I then learned that prior to cold-pressing lemon water, Yanni was a Division 1 NCAA basketball coach, which, after meeting him, made everything click together. He is the definition of hard work and hustle.
We didn't know it yet, but both Yanni and Frank LA were about to embark on new chapters of growth together.
Yanni was breaking ground on Lemon Perfect, dashing from co-packer meeting to investor call to creative reviews on planes, trains, and automobiles — often with a small zip cooler containing early formulations of his product. When he came to the NY office for a packaging review with us, we joked that he should have it handcuffed to his wrist on the plane.
At the same time, we were at a pivotal point in Frank LA's growth. Scaling up, we had just made the decision to bring Andrew Almeter on as our FT CD in LA (saving me lots flights and Zoom calls - also doing it better than I could have). Andrew led a combo team of LA and NY designers through the brand identity work.
Our first round of design was actually a whiff — we pushed too hard on the lemon aspect instead of the water, resulting in a retina-burning yellow-on-yellow first-round presentation 🤦♂️ . Coach Yanni, though, was able to give it to us straight but also rally and refocus us on what became the basis of what you see today. That's the team aspect of the BFC relationship. We both knew what each of us was capable of, and rather than stand on a standard client/agency relationship, we just got to work.
Once off the ground, we watched and celebrated all the phases of LP's growth. We saw it in the cooler case at Erewhon, then an end cap, selling online, larger stores, Amazon, in our friends' fridges, bigger and bigger booths at Expo West, and even with Beyoncé! Along the way, we were doing photoshoots, social assets, websites, e-comm, secondary logo marks, art direction, and packaging updates. It's been a fun ride!
Raising a glass of ice-cold Lemon Perfect to you, Yanni, and so many of our team. 🍋 Annie Vaughn Seely, Jay Sprogell, Rocky Santaferraro, Eric Almquist
