Case Study · Its own event identity
Backyard BBQ Club
Forty Never Felt So Playful. A founder’s 40th birthday, and the prototype that showed us what this brand was actually for.
- Occasion
- A 40th birthday
- Event identity
- Backyard BBQ Club
- Setting
- A garden, at home
- Our role
- Pieces and play, not planning
The brief
A milestone birthday at home, in a garden, with a mix of guests spanning three generations. No venue styling team, no event planner — just a host who wanted the day to feel deliberate rather than assembled, and who was going to be a guest at her own party.
Its own identity, not ours
The first decision was that the event should not be branded as The Ayaba Experience. It got its own name, its own look and its own line — Backyard BBQ Club: Forty Never Felt So Playful — and everything was designed to that, not to us. A celebration is the host’s, not the maker’s. Our mark stayed where it belongs: small, on the reverse.
What we made
- Personalised cups and water wraps, so the most-handled objects carried the identity
- Custom stickers used across favours, packaging and drinks
- Signage and printables — directions, menus, the small answers people need
- A personalised Ludo set, built around the occasion
- Lawn games, chosen for a mixed-age crowd and set up ready to play
- Thank-you details, packaged to be taken home rather than tidied away
Ayaba didn’t plan the party. It transformed how the party felt.
What we learned
This is the lesson the whole brand rests on. Nobody moved a table or booked a caterer. What changed the day was that roughly a dozen small things matched each other — the same colours, the same typeface, the same finish, from the drinks table to the thank-you cards — and that there was something for people to do together.
It also confirmed the harder discipline: every piece had to earn its place. A personalised object that adds nothing is just branded clutter, and a garden full of it would have felt like a promotion rather than a birthday.
Where it left us
Backyard BBQ Club is why the offer is shaped the way it is — products, coordinated edits, and curated play, sold separately but designed to work together. It remains its own event identity, distinct from this brand, and the standard we measure new work against.