In this series, Food & Drink Business revisits its Rising Star alumni. Our regular Rising Star feature in the print magazine profiles founders and their young companies, selected for innovation, creativity, tenacity, and potential. This week, we catch up with OMGhee founder Lisa Ormenyessy.
In October 2022, we profiled Ormenyessy, whose quest to improve her health led to the creation of her biodynamic and organic ghee brand OMGhee. A superfood used medicinally for thousands of years, ghee is used in everyday eating across India and the South Asian region. One of the core values at the centre of OMGhee is “the cook is sacred”, which Ormenyessy describes as a “philosophy about delivering the best possible ghee for healing and transformation”.
Since Food & Drink Business last spoke to OMGhee, the South Australian business has achieved a few milestones, picking up two Gold Medals at the 2023 SA Dairy Awards, and placing as a finalist in the 2023 SA Premier Awards for emerging business, new product and business excellence. It also recently added both Kosher and Halal certification to its labels – which will largely assist its future export plans.
However, after more than two years of business, Ormenyessy decided it was time to take a ‘critical’ next step: refreshing the brand.
“In a start-up, you’re usually running the business on the smell of an oily rag and it’s tempting to say no to change when you’re doing great already and hitting milestones,” said Ormenyessy
Her advice for fellow businesses cautious of taking the next strategic plunge was to keep striving for excellence.
“You eventually have to draw a line in the sand. Do you want to do just ok or do you want to create a business of excellence? If it’s the latter you need to be willing to listen to the experts and invest in yourself and your business,” said Ormenyessy.
Like many start-ups, OMGhee’s visual identity has grown organically over time, leading to a fragmented collection of assets and a disjointed brand story.
Using the strength of the brands existing values and elements to create its next iteration, Ormenyessy enlisted the help of creative agency BrandOpus to produce a refreshed, streamlined platform to propel the business’s future forward.
“Working with the BrandOpus team on revitalising OMGhee really helped me to understand how it had evolved and had become a kit of somewhat unrelated parts, meaning my marketing spend had to work twice as hard to achieve breakthrough and have any kind of impact,” said Ormenyessy.
BrandOpus Australia MD Nikki Moeschinger said that throughout a strategic realignment process, it weaved a brand story that brought together the central identity facets the brand: “the cook is sacred”, a premium price-point, and a light-hearted and playful tonality.
“Working with brands like OMGhee, and founders like Lisa, is such an enjoyable experience. Distilling her passion and energy into a visual identity that truly represents the positioning of the band, in an authentic way, is a rewarding process.
“Creating a new suite of assets for OMGhee as well as the new brand and pack design will activate the brand in a creatively repetitive way, so each and every time someone comes into contact with OMGhee, it will be instantly recognisable, and trigger those wonderful associations of optimism and joyous expression,” said Moeschinger.
Ultimately, the new visual identity aimed to bring to life the creative idea of “unleash the glow”, reflected in all elements of the brand down to its new shimmery labels, printed by Signature Labels using a Rafwine Blanc label substrate and embellished with gold foil, and its upgraded jars, produced by Gala Imports Australia.
OMGhee’s new aesthetic and packaging is certainly unexpected for the ghee category, with BrandOpus’ evaluation of the category finding competitors vying for space in either Indian heritage or a type of ‘earnest purity’, both of which are saturated.
“The feedback on the new branding was hesitant at first, but we quickly saw our followers and customers fall in love with the new-look, and like us, and they are now raving about it,” said Ormenyessy.
Despite the makeover, the glowy new identity of OMGhee still throws back to Ormenyessy and the brand’s original goal: putting ghee on the table of every household in Australia.
“OMGhee sits in the home cook market, while other ghee brands are of Indian heritage or of the ‘earnest purity’ category, we’re all about the home cook, and we’ve also really taken the lead on educating and advocating for the use ghee over and above curries,” said Ormenyessy.
Looking to the year ahead, OMGhee has big plans.
“This year our main focus is export, as well as working on our marketing automations, moving our website to a new platform, and making new flavours.
“I like to say that ghee currently sits where olive oil sat 50 years ago – only used for Italian cooking – and with the power of marketing and social media we’re hoping we can spread the real magic of ghee a lot quicker,” said Ormenyessy.
