Salmones Austral, the parent company of Secret Island, has been a premium supplier of Chilean salmon to top hotels and restaurants for 25 years. Leveraging their expertise in aquaculture, they founded Secret Island Salmon—their first direct-to-consumer brand that emphasizes education and transparency about their responsible aquaculture practices.

→ No brand presence in the United States.
Secret Island’s brand awareness was severely limited in a major market. It needed a strong, recognizable brand in order to access a significant portion of consumers and revenue, and compete with the brands that are already established here.

→ No website to sell their product.
Since Secret Island was a new brand that was still establishing themselves in the industry, the need for growth was imperative. The new site not only needed to sell fish, but tell users why they should buy their fish.

→ Lacking brand story and a name Americans could pronounce.
New brands always have the potential issue of gaining user’s trust and confidence because of the lack of history. Our research told us that more specifically, in the food industry, costumers are paying closer attention to where their food comes from and the environment impact it has. This was something we knew we needed to address.

→ Create a brand that captures the essence of the business as well as the target audience.
In order to create a visual that was near to the Secret Island brand and also resonated with our millennial target audience, we created a mermaid symbol. It was inspired by Pincoya, a mermaid based in Chilotan mythology that’s said to represent abundance. Through A/B testing, we refined a fresh and bright color palette. To further appeal to our audience, we included a Recipe index for adventurous eaters that also draws organic traffic and cross-pollinates products.

→ Construct a flexible, compelling e-commerce site to sell fish.
We gathered through research that the millennial audience was very comfortable shopping online, and was willing to pay for quality. Being a new brand, Secret Island needed a site that would grow to accommodate new products. We built in different ways of filtering to solve this. The Collections page allows users to easily browse categories at a high level, while All Products provides the ability to sort and drill down. We also featured real customer testimonials throughout the site to establish trust with our users.

→ Clearly convey mission, vision, values, and the Secret Island story.
To better articulate Secret Island’s story, we elevated their brand-building sections on the homepage to give the user history. We also called out their core values—quality, sustainability, and dedication—with custom iconography to draw appeal. We also created a high level About section in the main navigation to house pages like Our Story and Sustainability. Product pages also display various certification badges to highlight quality and sustainability practices to ethical shoppers.