It all started with a little boba tea shop by the train station in Mantua, Italy, where my wife and I were staying. Aside from the fantastic tea, the traditional homemade bao was some of the best we’d had in recent years so we kept coming back. That’s how we got to know the owner, a young guy who was clearly great at what he does. One afternoon, over another cup of tea, we got talking about how things were going with the shop. He wanted the business to grow, but the location wasn’t doing him any favors. I’d been curious about restaurant consulting for a while, so we talked, just two people at a counter working out a problem.
To a lot of locals, the menu was unfamiliar as it had items they’d never seen at other boba places. On top of that, customers kept complaining that the menu’s stock photos didn’t match what was actually arriving at their tables. When your product is unfamiliar, a photo that misleads people is expensive.
That felt like something I could help with, so I offered to photograph his drinks and put together a new menu that showed people what they’d actually be ordering. From there, I started thinking about how to shoot them in a way that suited the shop and the people coming through its doors.
Taking the Boba Tea Outside#
His shop was small, and most of his customers were students from a nearby university or people passing by from the train station. I wanted to create a grab-and-go feeling - drinks you could take around the city or on your walk to school. That’s why I settled on shooting the drinks out in the streets, which made sense for the people he was trying to reach and how they’d actually enjoy them. Here’s the thing, though: there was zero budget.
On a client project I’d normally bring in a photographer, stylist, and the whole setup. But here, I had to improvise. I came down on a Saturday, shot one drink from every category myself, with my wife as the hand model, and drank way too much boba tea.
We used the cobblestones, old walls and even the loud construction site right outside the business. By shooting the photos on streets people walk through every day, it gave the drinks character and made them feel real. The photos also matched the shop’s warm, down-to-earth vibe, so the menu felt more like the place we’d come to know.
After we finished shooting, the owner’s mother made us a nice warm lunch to celebrate a good day of honest work. There was something oddly comforting about exchanging services for services.
From Drink Photography to a New Menu#
I took the photos home, touched them up, and put together a new menu for him. I also created a digital menu to make it shareable on his community platforms. However, the problem of location still remained, so we also helped him launch his store on Deliveroo, a local food delivery app. Using the new menu photos and a proper cover image, this profile created an online presence that would reach well beyond his usual customers.
Fast forwarding to a few weeks later, he told me people were ordering the new special when they walked into the shop, and the teas that were usually passed on were selling too.
That’s the part I often think about, because nothing in this project was expensive. It started with listening to a customer complaint and solving it with whatever I had on hand. A big rebrand, new signs and a whole marketing campaign would have been great, but unrealistic for this business.
I recently read Brian Collins’s The Rabbit and the Banjo, where a designer shows a banjo shop that its customers came in wanting to play music, and turns it into a place that makes musicians. It reminded me that our job is to understand what people need and do the work that helps them. For this shop, that simply meant shooting honest photos, creating a clearer menu and making the drinks easier to get.
Budget helps, but noticing is free.
And yes - I got paid in boba for life. Whenever we go back, the owner and his mom take great care of us, and I’d say that was a pretty fair trade.