Roadhouse
Courtyard branding strategy

01 Start here

One screen. If you read nothing else in this document, read this.

The decision

Delta Roadhouse becomes the master brand, and every business on the site is named under it — Mimi’s at Roadhouse, Chef Joe’s at Roadhouse, the bar. One destination, several businesses, one marketing spend. The businesses stay legally and operationally separate; only the experience is joined.

The dates that matter

What is already built

What we need from you

1. What does the licensed premises physically cover — answered: yes, the courtyard is inside it.
2. Which Shopify arrangement you are comfortable with — see §23.
3. The bar — answered: it keeps the Delta Roadhouse name, no separate name needed.
4. Vector artwork and the two font names from whoever drew the logo.
5. The Arcade — confirmed: a Roadhouse venue, with Mimi’s inside it.

What it costs

The build is not invoiced. It is the consideration for running the trailer on the campus. Monthly maintenance is simplified and still to agree; changes beyond that are agreed per piece. §23.

Who is who

02 The roadmap

Five phases, each with one end goal. Brand, then builds, then launch, then the content and marketing engine that runs after launch, then growth. §03 zooms into phase 2 at task level; this is the shape of the whole thing.

The known dates, in one place

The five phases

03 The next ten days

Dates, owners and blockers in one place. Everywhere else in this document these live in four separate sections; this is the join.

04 The goal, in your words

Everything downstream in this document is judged against this one paragraph. If a decision does not serve it, the decision is wrong.

What that sentence actually decides

It is not a mood statement. It settles four questions that would otherwise each cost a meeting:

Those two statements pull in opposite directions, and holding both is the actual job. Unify the experience; keep the entities clean. §09 is where that line gets drawn, and it is the section most worth reading twice.

The test we will keep applying

A customer 40 miles away should be able to answer "what is Roadhouse?" in one sentence, without listing the tenants. If they answer by naming businesses, the campus brand has failed and we are still running three marketing budgets.

05 What changed today

Draft 1 is frozen as the record of the pre-meeting position. This is what moved after it, and it is a lot — two of the plan's biggest unknowns closed in one day.

What carries over from Draft 1 unchanged

• The September dates and everything they imply — §24.
• The finding that colour will not separate these brands — and it now matters even more, for a reason that has flipped. §11.
• Mimi's existing content system is not ours to break — the daily Flavor Board at 12:45 MT, and the hard cap of 2 non-daily posts per platform per day.
• The wireframes, 7-beat scroll storyboard, 30-day calendar, 10 static cards and 5 motion assets. The beats survive the rename; the names on them do not.

06 Where each brand actually stands

Honest status. Nothing here is aspirational — it is what exists on disk or at a live URL today.

07 The three builds — live now

All three are real, deployed and clickable. All three are noindex — deliberately invisible to Google until the names are final.

The hub, measured against the site it would replace

Both numbers below were measured on 3 September, same connection, same method.

What each build contains

Delta Roadhouse hub — open it

Chef Joe’s at Roadhouse — open it

Under the hood: order, quote and live stock-count run on Cloudflare Functions with a KV-backed stock model, so “30 Smoke Burgers left today” is real rather than decorative. This is the piece the POS decision affects — see §09.

Mimi’s at Roadhouse — open it

Five real pages with their own artwork, sitemap and redirects. Two changes before launch: the bright pass Joe asked for, and the 21+ page under Delta Roadhouse’s licence.

SEO, keywords, geotagging, ranking and analytics

08 Brand architecture — branded house

There are three ways to organise a group of businesses. Your principle picks one of them outright.

The structure

DELTA ROADHOUSE            the destination · the master brand · the address
        │                     the Pick appears on every asset below
        ├── Chef Joe's   at Roadhouse    courtyard kitchen  ·  Sun–Wed
        ├── Mimi's       at Roadhouse    the Arcade         ·  TBD
        ├── The Bar      at Roadhouse    music & drinks     ·  Fri–Sat
        └── [ open slot ] at Roadhouse    venue #4, #5 …       ·  §14

What this costs, honestly

• The Bar needs a name. Today "Delta Roadhouse" means both the campus and the bar inside it. That ambiguity is survivable now and will not be at four venues. Flagged in §26.
• Mimi's gives up some autonomy — its standalone equity now partly feeds Roadhouse. Worth it, but it is a real trade and Miles, TW and Mimi's should agree to it explicitly.
• Every existing printed asset under the old names becomes stock to burn down, not artwork to reprint.

09 Clean lines — unity without licensing risk

The one place where the branded house deliberately stops short. Everything in §08 is about making three businesses feel like one place. This section is about making sure they never legally look like one business.

What unifies, and what stays separate

Five rules that keep the line clean

1. Alcohol appears only under the Delta Roadhouse mark. Chef Joe’s and Mimi’s marks never appear on a drink menu, a drink special, or a 21+ promotion.
2. Each business keeps its own legal name on invoices, contracts, quotes and site footers — the trading name is the brand, the legal name is the entity, and both appear where they should.
3. Nothing implies Chef Joe’s or Mimi’s serves alcohol. “Grab a drink from the bar” is fine. “Chef Joe’s serves beer” is not.
4. 21+ content lives on the Roadhouse hub only — never on the Mimi’s or Chef Joe’s pages. The Arcade will bring minors onto the campus.
5. Joint promotions name both businesses. They never merge into a single trade name.

10 The naming system

The rename handed us a pattern that was already half-built. All three venues now resolve to the same three words.

House style — write it the same way every time

Chef Joe's vs Joe's Catering — the one open naming question

You gave two names. They are not competitors; read as a brand and a service line they resolve cleanly, and this is the recommendation:

One brand, two service lines. Two brands would double the recognition problem you just said you want to avoid — so unless you want them genuinely separate, "Chef Joe's" is the brand and catering is something it does.

11 Colour — measured, and the finding has flipped

Every number here is CIE Lab ΔE computed from the actual hex values, using the same method as Draft 1 so the two documents can be compared directly.

The Delta Roadhouse palette

How the campus colours actually relate

ΔE is perceptual distance. Below about 20 on ΔE76, two colours read as the same family to a customer across a parking lot.

Navy is the discovery

Navy #183C6B is the only cool colour anywhere on the campus, and it is more than 100 ΔE76 from every warm colour the three businesses use. Nothing competes with it and nothing ever will. That makes it uniquely suited to one job:

This is also why the identity survives growth: venue #4 gets a warm accent, and the navy frame around it is unchanged. See §14.

12 Type, marks & silhouette

If colour deliberately unifies, something else must do the separating. Draft 1's answer was type. That still holds — and the Roadhouse mark adds a second, stronger channel.

The Pick

The mark is a guitar pick holding a DR monogram, mountains, a river, a raft and two guitars. Two things about it matter strategically:

• It ships in four colourways already. The guide treats one silhouette recoloured as normal. That is precisely the mechanism a multi-venue campus needs, and it is already in the brand's own rules — we are not bending it.
• Its content is the destination, not the bar. Mountains, a river, a raft — that is Delta, Colorado and a day out. A bar mark would have been a bottle or a neon sign. This mark can carry a whole campus without being repainted, which is lucky, because it now has to.

Separation by silhouette

The strongest recognition channel at distance is not colour or typeface — it is outline. Each venue should own a shape that is identifiable as a black blob at 24px:

13 The campus visual system

Proposal. This is the part to argue with — it is written to be edited.

Colour roles

The three standing rules

14 Designed to grow — the open venue slot

You said the system has to protect the vision as we add more venues. That is a design requirement, not a hope, so here is the mechanism that delivers it.

What a new venue gets, and what it may not touch

The roadmap is no longer hypothetical — and it is bigger than we thought

Delta Roadhouse’s own website already states the full vision, in their words: “part live music venue, part arcade, part tavern, and eventually your launch point for river adventures on the Gunnison… Grab a drink. Play a few games. Catch a band. Float the river. Stay the night.”

15 Messaging & voice

Three jobs, three voices, one place. You already wrote the two hardest lines — this section works out why they land and gives you variants to push against.

Private events

Set with full stops rather than commas it reads as three claims instead of one list. And it is doing more than it looks: three possessives in six words — your, our, Joe’s — state the entire operating structure. The customer brings the occasion, Roadhouse provides the place, Chef Joe’s provides the food.

Variants to push against

• Your party. Our place. Joe’s food. recommended
• Your people. Our place. Joe’s food.
• Your occasion. Our courtyard. Joe’s food.
• Your celebration. Our place. Joe’s food.

The supporting paragraph

The truck, off-site

“Roadhouse roots” is the endorsement doing free work in a parking lot 40 miles from the address. That is the marketing-dollar argument made physical: the truck sells lunch and advertises the campus in the same breath, on days the campus is closed.

Variants

• Joe’s food. Roadhouse roots. Now rolling your way. recommended
• Roadhouse roots. Now rolling your way.
• Roadhouse roots, road-tested.
• Joe’s food. Off the lot, on the road.

Voice per brand

The campus voice is Roadhouse’s. Venue voices live inside it — on a venue page the venue speaks, but the nav, footer and hours board always speak as Roadhouse.

16 The week — a reason to come on a Tuesday

You liked having something every day. Below is more than we will use on purpose — the point is to choose from a full board and swap by season, rather than invent a night under pressure.

Different menus, without seven menus

The mechanism is a fixed core menu plus one rotating day feature. It is worth being deliberate about why, because the alternative is seductive and expensive:

• One extra prep item, not seven menus. The kitchen load barely moves.
• Social gets a reason to post daily without inventing news — which matters, because Chef Joe’s cannot match Mimi’s automated cadence with one person who is cooking.
• Seasonality lives in the feature, so the core menu stays printed and stable.
• A failed night costs one day, not a menu reprint.

Four rules

1. One named night per day. Maximum.
2. A night runs eight weeks before it gets printed on anything permanent.
3. Friday and Saturday stay Smoke & Heat. That is the anchor; it does not rotate.
4. A night belongs to whichever venue the trade actually benefits — see the trivia note.

The seasonal layer

17 Delta Roadhouse — the house

The column that was blank in every Draft 1 matrix. Here is what the guidelines actually give us, and what they leave open.

18 Mimi's at Roadhouse — the Arcade

The hard case, treated as one.

Mimi's is the only venue with equity of its own — a public site at mimissweettreats.com, an audience, and a content engine that already runs without us. Folding it under Roadhouse is the single most valuable move available and the one most likely to cause friction. Both things are true.

The two things that must not break

19 Chef Joe's at Roadhouse — courtyard & catering

One day old as a name. Everything visual starts from zero — which, given the system above, is now an advantage rather than a setback.

Two service lines, one brand

What Draft 1 built that survives

The site at vivere-colorado.pages.dev is built but thin, noindex, and now carries the wrong name throughout. Its structure — status rail, order-ahead, week strip, menu — was sound and is worth keeping. Its brand layer is dead. Draft 1's own design note said all brand-bearing assets sit behind tokens and one SVG sprite specifically so a rename would be an asset swap rather than a redesign. That decision is about to pay for itself.

20 The areas, and the private-events engine

Four sheets from the meeting: which parts of the campus people can actually book, what can be bundled into a private event, and the flow Joe wants an engine to run.

The bookable areas

Drawn as a fan out of the Pick. These are areas of the campus people can use — not five separate brands. That distinction matters, and Joe made it explicitly.

What can go into a private event

Six components, drawn as speech bubbles:

The engine, as Joe drew it

Three boxes on the left, an arrow reading “we will map their vision to our options”, and the resolved options on the right. That arrow is the whole idea: the customer describes what they want in their own terms, and the engine translates it into what the campus can actually deliver.

21 Site architecture & domains

Confirmed structure: deltaroadhouse.com is the hub, with a landing page for each venue, and each venue gets its own domain. Below is how to do that without splitting the marketing effort you are trying to concentrate.

deltaroadhouse.com          the hub · the destination · the master brand
    |
    |-- /hours              the combined hours board  ← highest-value module
    |-- /whats-on           the week · §16
    |-- /chef-joes    ←--  [joe domain].com       courtyard + catering
    |-- /mimis        ←--  [mimis domain].com     the Arcade
    |-- /the-bar            music, Smoke & Heat, 21+   ← all alcohol lives here
    |-- /events             Your party. Our place. Joe’s food.
    `-- /catering     ←--  off-site truck · Roadhouse roots…

How the venue domains should behave

“Its own domain” and “one marketing footprint” sound like they conflict. They do not — as long as we are clear that a domain is a marketing address and the hub is the website. The truck needs something short painted on its side. The business needs one search footprint. Both are satisfiable.

22 Retrofitting the two dev builds

Two sites are already built and neither matches this vision. This is the file-level plan for each. Both are noindex, so all of it can happen in the open with no search risk.

A · Chef Joe’s was Vivere Colorado

What is left on Chef Joe’s

B · Mimi’s at Roadhouse

What makes the main Mimi’s site bright — and it is not the red

Worth being precise, because “keep it bright” is easy to get wrong. On mimissweettreats.com the ground is literal white, with a fixed diner photograph behind it at 52% opacity and every content block floating on a warm frosted-glass panel. That stack is what reads as bright. Red and gold are used almost entirely as type colour and thin rules — almost never as large fills.

The work

Order of work

1. The shared campus layer first. Navy frame, Pick, nav, footer, hours board — built once, included by both.
2. Chef Joe’s second. It is in public at the car show on the 11th, and it is the smaller file.
3. Mimi’s third. It is blocked on the licence answer for #adult, and starting it before that answer risks building the wrong thing twice.

23 Rebuilding deltaroadhouse.com

Delta Roadhouse owns the domain, and the store runs on Shopify. Here is what we measured on the current site, what a rebuild changes, and what it would cost — which, as agreed, is nothing in cash.

What we measured — the honest version

Measured live on 3 September. The current site is not broken. It is a competent Shopify theme on a fast network, it is clean on mobile, and several things are already right. Both columns below are real numbers, including the ones that favour the current site.

Most of the weight is not the theme’s fault — it is accumulated apps. That is normal on Shopify and it is what a purpose-built page avoids.

Why a rebuild is worth doing

How this fits with Shopify

The domain is registered through Shopify and the trailer and catering will run through Delta Roadhouse’s POS. Nothing here asks you to move your commerce. Three ways to arrange it:

DNS is managed in the Shopify admin, so pointing a subdomain at the hub is a few minutes’ work. Moving the main address is a bigger decision and entirely yours — we would not propose it as though it were free.

The arrangement

What we would need from you

• A decision on which of the three Shopify arrangements above you are comfortable with.
• Access to the DNS settings in the Shopify admin — or someone on your side to make one change.
• Vector artwork for the Pick, and the two typeface names from whoever made the logo.
• Confirmed hours for the Tavern, live music and the Arcade.
• A decision on the bar’s name — answered, it keeps the campus name — §17.

24 September — the real timeline

Updated 3 Sept with the confirmed dates. The order has changed: Mimi’s now ships before Chef Joe’s, and the trailer’s first public appearance is two days before its opening day.

25 Intake gaps — what we still need

Tick as they land. Everything here blocks something downstream.

From Delta Roadhouse

From Naomi — Mimi's

From Joe

26 Decisions log

Open decisions with a recommendation attached to each, so none of them needs a meeting to answer — only a yes or a no.

27 Plan of action

Ordered by what unblocks the most. The six-day runway to 9 September sets the top.

By 9 September — Mimi’s live

End goal: ice cream in the courtyard and the Arcade, on a page that looks like the campus, not a placeholder.

By 11–13 September — Chef Joe’s in public, then open

End goal: a site that survives being seen by strangers at a car show two days before it has to survive being seen by regulars at home.

Then — the build

End goal: the hub live, the content engine re-cut, and every page carrying the campus system without anyone having to remember the rules by hand.

28 Plain English

Every term in this document that is jargon, explained once. If something here is still unclear, that is a fault in the document, not in the reader.

29 The content system — what the voice actually produces

§15 settled how the campus sounds and §16 settled what happens on which night. This section is the bridge between them and a posting calendar: the formats, who can realistically make each one, and — the part that governs everything else — what photography actually exists today.

What exists today, by brand

The format menu

Five formats, ranked by what they cost to make. The discipline is not making all five — it is knowing which one a given week can actually sustain.

Pillars, per brand

30 Month one — 9 September to 8 October

Two openings, a car show, a hardware-store demo and a photo shoot, in thirty days. The shoot lands on the 21st, which splits the month cleanly in half: twelve days that have to work without professional photography, then a library that changes what is possible.

Week by week

The shot list — what the session has to come back with

Michael is family and a branding professional, which means the session can be briefed properly rather than hoped at. This is what the next two months of content needs to exist:

31 The campaign storyboard — frame by frame

§30 is the schedule. This is the thing itself: every frame of month one, with the picture described, the copy drafted, and the asset it needs marked have it or needs the shoot. Nothing here invents an hour, a price or a menu item, and nothing puts alcohol under the Mimi’s or Chef Joe’s marks. Copy is a draft to react to, not a decision already made.

Act one — the openings 9–15 Sept

Act two — the week finds its rhythm 16–22 Sept

Act three — the shoot 21–28 Sept

Act four — the library lands 29 Sept–8 Oct

32 Months two and three — pathways, not a calendar

Writing October and November as fixed calendars today would be inventing facts about a business that has not opened yet. Instead: three branch points, each with a signal that decides which way it goes, and an honest default for the likely case where nobody is measuring anything closely.

What to actually watch

Branch A — the shoot

Branch B — what the openings tell you

Branch C — the obstacles worth pre-deciding

33 Open notes

Scratch space. Everything typed anywhere in this report is saved in this browser and comes out of the Export notes button in the top bar.