Mabel's Staples | Creed Strategic Imaging

If you want to know what’s coming next, just ask me. Case in point, Mabel’s Staples Simple and Whole Foods, a charming neighborhood general store turned local gathering-place built at a time when the words whole foods were a noun, not an iconic natural foods brand.

Mabel’s Staples was born long before Creed Strategic Imaging was on my radar. Inexplicably, I had hired myself to do what we do now for start-ups like Mabel’s, for mid-size companies, and for Fortune 500’s—brand build. I’ll even admit that I created Mabel’s visual, verbal and brand identity when I didn’t know that was an expertise (or was called brand building). You see, I was creating a shop emanating from the personal belief system written right on our packaging, “The way I look at it, food is a lot like life. You get out of it exactly what you put into it.”

True serial entrepreneurs, my husband and I conceived, designed, built, and operated Mabel’s Staples Simple and Whole Foods ahead of a trend. It began with soups, ready-made and dry, pre-packaged bean soups, and a juice bar before juicing had a movement. Then we convinced a milk factory to reopen so we could introduce glass-bottled milk to a generation that didn’t know it ever existed; we sold Mabel’s labeled natural foods, beauty products, dry goods, and even offered healthful cooking classes in our authentic barn wood fabricated shop (oh, about the barn wood, that was also before it was known as reclaimed wood).

Days began at 4am with trips to the food terminal or the milk factory, and ended at 9pm for one of us, while the other dashed home for dinner with our four kids. Want to know more? Write! We’d be happy to tell you.