Sticky Fingers

Project Overview
Sticky Fingers Ribhouse is a Charleston institution. Founded in 1992 by three high school friends — Chad Walldorf, Jeff Goldstein, and Todd Eischeid — who moved from Chattanooga to the Lowcountry with nothing but a family rib recipe and a belief that Charleston needed Memphis-style hickory-smoked barbecue, Sticky Fingers grew from a single location on Johnnie Dodds Boulevard in Mount Pleasant into a beloved regional chain with 16 restaurants across five southeastern states. For years, it was the kind of place where President George W. Bush stopped in for ribs, where a portrait of Stephen Colbert hung on the wall, and where the food was as much a part of Charleston’s identity as the architecture.

But years of ownership changes after the founders’ departure had taken a toll. The brand had drifted. The look was dated, the website was outdated, and the visual identity no longer reflected the authenticity and Southern soul that made Sticky Fingers great in the first place. When the founders returned to reclaim and revitalize the brand, they called on me to help bring it back to life — strategically, visually, and digitally.

The Challenge
Rebranding a restaurant is different from building one from scratch. When a brand already has equity — when people grew up eating there, when the name carries real nostalgia — the work isn’t about inventing something new. It’s about excavating what made the brand great, removing everything that drifted away from it, and rebuilding with honesty and intention. That’s a harder assignment than starting with a blank canvas.

Sticky Fingers had allowed years of inconsistent ownership to erode its identity. The imagery on the website was generic and uninspiring. The headlines were flat. The menus had lost their personality. The digital presence didn’t reflect the warmth, humor, and genuine Southern hospitality that lived in the restaurants themselves. There was no e-commerce functionality — no way to sell the signature sauces that were already on grocery shelves nationwide, no to-go ordering, no way to extend the brand relationship beyond the dining room.

Beyond the functional gaps, there was a deeper brand question that needed answering first: in a barbecue market that had grown dramatically more competitive since 1992, what made Sticky Fingers worth choosing? What was the thing that no competitor could claim? I needed to find that answer before I touched a single design element.

My Process
Before any creative work began, I went deep on what actually made Sticky Fingers special. The answer wasn’t the sauce — though the sauce is legitimately great. It wasn’t just the food. It was an authenticity that came from true Southern roots: the commitment to cooking Memphis-style hickory-smoked barbecue the right way, low and slow, and a genuine hospitality that you can’t manufacture or franchise your way into. That’s a brand truth that had survived ownership changes, economic downturns, and years of drift. It just needed to be voiced again.

From that foundation, I worked with the Sticky Fingers team to build a smart, strategic creative brief. The single differentiating brand idea we landed on was this: Sticky Fingers has the food you love and the experience you crave. It sounds simple, and it is — which is exactly what made it right. Great barbecue brands don’t overthink their positioning. They just tell you exactly what they are, and they say it with personality.

Brand Voice & Taglines
One of the most enjoyable parts of this project was developing the brand voice — the personality behind the words. Sticky Fingers is a brand that can get away with things most brands can’t. It has enough history, enough charm, and enough Southern irreverence to say something like ‘#Cuegasm’ on social media and have it land perfectly. That’s a voice built on genuine confidence, not manufactured edginess.

With a suite of tagline options that reflected that voice across different contexts and campaign needs: ‘For the love of awesome sauce.’ ‘Let’s get this pork party started.’ ‘Sweet tea wishes and barbecue dreams.’ Each one carried the warmth, humor, and unmistakable Southern spirit that is Sticky Fingers at its best. Getting the voice right wasn’t just a copywriting exercise — it set the tone for every other creative decision that followed.

New Menus & Food Photography
The menus were one of the most visible failures of the old brand. Dated design, generic photography, headlines that had no personality — for a restaurant that lives and dies on the appetite it creates before the food even arrives, that’s a critical problem. A menu isn’t just a list of what you’re selling. It’s a sales tool, a brand expression, and an experience in itself.

I redesigned the full menu system from the dining menu to the bar menu, applying the new brand language, typography, and layout system to create something that felt as good to hold as the food was to eat. I collaborated with photographer Mathew Scott of Scott Shot Photography to commission a new suite of food imagery — mouthwatering shots that replaced the forgettable stock-style photos with real, crave-inducing visuals that actually looked like the food Sticky Fingers was proud to serve.

The before-and-after was stark. Generic headlines became attention-grabbing statements. Flat, lifeless photos became the kind of images that make you hungry just looking at them. The menu went from a chore to read to a reason to come in.

Responsive Website & UX/UI
The website rebuild was the centerpiece of the digital transformation. The old site was not mobile-optimized, had no e-commerce capability, and no online to-go ordering — a significant revenue gap in an era when digital ordering was already becoming an expectation, not a luxury. I designed and built a fully responsive site that worked seamlessly across desktop and mobile, with the brand’s new visual identity applied consistently throughout.
The UX decisions were driven by understanding how Sticky Fingers’ customers actually use a restaurant website. They want to see the menu fast, find a location, and order with minimal friction. I designed the information architecture around those priorities — clear navigation, prominent calls-to-action, and a to-go ordering flow that was intuitive from landing page to checkout.

The homepage was built to do what great restaurant web design should do: make you hungry and make you feel something before you read a single word. Hero imagery, bold brand statements, and the new food photography worked together to immediately communicate the personality and quality of the brand.

E-Commerce — Sauce, Swag & To-Go Ordering
Adding e-commerce was a strategic priority. Sticky Fingers’ bottled sauces were already in approximately 4,000 grocery stores nationwide at their peak — there was clearly demand for the product beyond the restaurant walls. Building a direct-to-consumer channel on the website meant Sticky Fingers could capture that revenue, build a direct relationship with customers across the country, and extend the brand into homes far beyond the Southeast.

I built out the full e-commerce functionality covering sauce sales, branded merchandise, and apparel alongside the online to-go ordering system for local customers. The checkout experience was designed to match the warmth and simplicity of the brand — nothing clinical or transactional, just easy and enjoyable.

Apparel & Brand Collateral
The t-shirt designs were a critical part of restoring Sticky Fingers’ cultural credibility. A restaurant brand’s merch is a statement about how people feel about the place — you only wear a restaurant’s shirt if you’re genuinely proud to rep it. I designed a range of apparel that had real personality: bold graphics, strong typography, designs that leaned into the brand’s Southern barbecue roots with the kind of confidence that only 30-plus years of history can give you.
Beyond apparel, I designed a full suite of brand collateral including business cards and promotional materials — all built on the new visual system to ensure that every physical touchpoint reinforced the same brand identity as the digital one.

The Outcome
The rebrand gave Sticky Fingers a visual and strategic foundation worthy of its history. The new identity stripped away years of brand drift and replaced it with something that felt honest, Southern, and genuinely appetizing — a look and voice that the restaurants themselves could be proud of and that customers could reconnect with.

The website launched with full e-commerce and to-go ordering capabilities that hadn’t existed before, opening new revenue channels and extending the brand’s reach beyond the dining room. The new food photography and menu designs immediately elevated the guest experience at every touchpoint, from the moment someone landed on the homepage to the moment they opened a menu at the table.

It’s worth noting the full arc of this brand’s story: Sticky Fingers eventually faced the headwinds that challenged the entire casual dining category — pandemic closures, inflation, and the compounding effects of inconsistent leadership years earlier. The chain filed for bankruptcy protection in 2025 and ultimately closed its final locations. But none of that diminishes the power of what the brand represented or the quality of the work done to revitalize it. The rebrand happened at a moment when the founders were genuinely committed to getting Sticky Fingers back to its best self, and the creative work reflected that commitment fully.
I’m especially proud of this one because the client relationship was personal. Chad Walldorf, co-founder of Sticky Fingers, wrote in his recommendation: ‘I found him to be highly creative and very easy-going and his work was always of the best quality. I am confident that Kevin would make a great addition to any creative team.’ That kind of trust — from a founder who built something from nothing and spent years fighting to get it back — means everything.

Deliverables
— Brand strategy, positioning, and creative brief
— Brand voice development and tagline suite
— Full menu redesign — dining menu and bar menu
— Food photography art direction (with Mathew Scott / Scott Shot Photography)
— Responsive website design and build
— E-commerce integration — sauce sales, merchandise, and apparel
— Online to-go ordering system
— Search engine optimization
— Apparel and t-shirt design
— Email campaign design
— Business cards and brand collateral