Service designBrand identityOperations

Blackbox
Sandwiches

A sandwich shop in Morganton, North Carolina. I designed the brand, the menu, the space, and the operational systems.

A measured plan of the shop with both routes drawn on it. The kitchen runs along the top: mop and storage, dish along the back wall, a make unit, a prep table in the middle of the floor, coolers and ovens to the right, and beverage equipment at the far end. A counter runs almost the full width, with the register at its right-hand end. The front of house below it holds tables, stools and the entrance. A dashed teal route, the sandwich build, runs from the make unit down past the presses and the finishing bench and across the counter at the register. A solid red route, the guest journey, comes in through the door, up to the counter, along to the register, and back into the room to a table. Both are numbered 01 to 04.

Then I stepped out of it. Six months on, the systems are still succeeding without me.

Role
Brand, menu, space, kitchen systems, web
Not mine
Co-owned with my dad. He worked a full-time job through the build, developed sandwiches with me, and runs day-to-day operations now.
Timeline
Designed 2025handed over Feb 2026
Constraint
Lean startup budget, break even inside a year
Status
Open since Nov 20255.0 on Google

Every decision had to work for

  1. 01a customerdecide fast, and trust the place
  2. 02a cookno guessing, no judgment calls
  3. 03the foodconsistent, and it holds up
  4. 04the clocka lunch rush is ninety minutes long
  5. 05the brandrecognizable at an inch and a half and at three feet

at the same time.

The easy small-town spot goes warm and cozy. I went the opposite direction.

The drawing I worked from

Survived

  1. The wall, down to counter height

    Reduced by about sixteen inches. Kitchen behind, dining in front, no hatch and no door.

  2. The zones, and what belongs in each

    Every zone sat where this drawing put it, holding what this drawing gave it.

Claire's hand-drawn layout of the shop: triple sink and dry rack along the back wall, storage and a bathroom to the left, a long prep table, a reach-in freezer and dry store to the right, and a cooler and make unit running through the middle. Below them, in her handwriting, 'reduce height ≈16 inch counter' with an arrow, and 'proposed new counter'. Counters with stools run along the front and the right-hand wall, with a booth in the corner.
The layout drawing, with its own revisions on it

Did not

  1. How the equipment sat inside them

    The arrangement within each zone moved once the room was real.

  2. Counter stools and booths

    The wait and the seats were the same strip of floor, and booths were poor at the budget. Every table but one was built instead.

What it cost

Seats.

Blackbox has 13, floor space is the hardest limit on the business, and cutting the stools and the booths bought standing room with covers it can never sell.

1

Walk one

The guest

Customer experience and perception, start to finish.

The front of the menu, cream type on black: nine hot sandwiches in three columns, each with a name, price, description in gray, and the bread in italic underneath. Chili and leaf markers flag spicy, vegetarian and vegan. A rule at the foot reads 'all sandwiches come with chips – upgrade to house salad for $2'.
Front: hot, and only hot

02

The menu

Every row is the same object.

The card is designed to be scanned, not read.

The back of the menu: cold sandwiches, a kids column and a sides column, with opening hours and the catering line at the foot.
Back: everything that must not compete

What it cost

Charm.

The menu the shop opened with: a yellow card with a cartoon character, pastel speech bubbles, a hand-drawn salad shape and sandwich names in an outlined display face, prices set away from the names.
The card it replacedFriendlier, and it gives up the identity, the credibility, and everything a card is for during a rush

03

The handoff

I cannot art-direct what a customer posts. I can decide what is underneath the food when they do.

A chopped sandwich on a roll, halved and standing on checkered paper on a wooden table by a window.
A pressed sandwich cut in half and stood on its cut edges: toasted bread, melted cheese, shredded chicken, tomato and iceberg showing at the cut, on black and white checkered paper.
A slice of pistachio and chocolate dessert on checkered paper, on a stainless tray.

Three different things to eat, one surface underneath all of them

A black takeout box open on a white counter: a sandwich in compostable wrap and a bag of Deep River chips inside, the logo stickered onto the front flap, and a stack of closed black boxes behind it against an orange wall.
Black box, sticker across the closure: sealed and branded in one motion
The review card: a cream ground with torn black shapes across the top and bottom corners, a large QR code labeled SCAN TO REVIEW, the words THANKS FOR EATING WITH US in black capitals, YOUR FEEDBACK HELPS US GROW at the foot, and the alligator logo in the lower right.
300 cards at opening, once. Asking is the part I designed; the 5.0 is not mine alone

What it cost

Margin.

A black box hides the sandwich and costs more than a white one. It pays a premium to ask the brand and the paper to do that work instead.

04

The room

Three painted ceiling tiles decided the room.

The question the whole build ran on was how to make brand, fun and design ourselves, with very little money.

Three ceiling tiles painted as samples and laid on the existing speckled floor under the front window: a burnt orange, a mid blue and a warmer orange, against the black-painted base of the block wall.
Two oranges and a blue, painted onto the actual ceiling tile and laid on the floor to be judged in the room’s own light. The ceiling took the burnt orange.
The room mid-build with the suspended ceiling painted deep orange, walls still bare block, and an orange door at the far end.
The ceiling went first
A close view of four surfaces meeting: a blue-painted block wall, a black reveal, a white-painted block pier, and a flat orange wall, in four vertical bands.
Blue, black, white, orange, at four edges
Orange molded stools along a plywood counter at the window, with four framed prints above and a small table carrying a goose illustration set under its surface.
And on the objects people touch

The homepage does the menu’s job before anyone reaches the door.

The top of the homepage in black: the alligator logo, the shop name, Morganton NC and 5.0 on Google, three orange buttons reading view menu, catering and order online, and two photographs of food shot on the shop's checkered paper.
Three things to do. Ordering runs through DoorDash, so the button is the whole integration.
The homepage's picks row on white: 'our picks' in orange, then three sandwiches labeled staff favorite, most ordered and signature, each with a one-line description.
Three things to eat. Staff favorite, most ordered, signature. Three different reasons to trust a sandwich.

What it cost

The other six sandwiches.

Only one of the three is chosen from order data; the others are the staff’s pick and ours. Naming any of them is slightly self-fulfilling: it becomes part of the reason it sells, and the six below never get the same chance.

2

Walk two

The sandwich

The same room from the other side of the counter, and the part a customer only half sees.

01

The line

Two people, one direction, and a cooler split down the middle by the press.

A measured plan of the shop with both routes drawn on it. The kitchen runs along the top: mop and storage, dish along the back wall, a make unit, a prep table in the middle of the floor, coolers and ovens to the right, and beverage equipment at the far end. A counter runs almost the full width, with the register at its right-hand end. The front of house below it holds tables, stools and the entrance. A dashed teal route, the sandwich build, runs from the make unit down past the presses and the finishing bench and across the counter at the register. A solid red route, the guest journey, comes in through the door, up to the counter, along to the register, and back into the room to a table. Both are numbered 01 to 04.
  1. 01builtmake unit, far side
  2. 02pressedround the corner of the L
  3. 03finishedcold, in the near side of the same unit
  4. 04wrapped + boxedand run out, by the finisher

One cooler serves both sides of the press: pressable ingredients in the far half, cold in the near half. So a sandwich comes out of the press and is finished without traveling.

Two people work it, a builder and a finisher, and they never swap position. They hand over.

A laminated build sheet in a punched sleeve on a white wall. Each sandwich is a boxed block: a name and bread across the top, then two columns divided by a vertical rule standing for the press. The right column holds what gets pressed: chicken, cheddar, onions, paneer, peppers, turkey and pastrami, provolone, beef, shrooms. The left column holds what finishes it afterwards: pickle, arugula, garlic aioli, iceberg, herb sauce.
One block per sandwich, split by the press

The rule down the middle is the press.

Through it on the right, added after on the left. It reads right to left, the way the line runs.

The kitchen seen from the register position, under the orange ceiling. A cook in red works the presses in the corner; behind him the builder in gray stands at the make unit; another person works at the back bench, and a fourth runs a stand mixer at the prep counter.
The working line

02

The recipe

Organized systems mean a clean, tight line and safe food handling.

100100100

Health inspection score. Three times.

Recipes standardized, mains pre-portioned, and batch sizes scaled to the containers they get stored in rather than to the number of sandwiches. Prep, storage and rotation stop being three systems that have to agree and become one.

Judgment is expensive at lunchtime and cheap at nine in the morning.

One cook building one sandwich, and the whole system is in it:

  • two sanitation buckets, one holding the sandwich knife between cuts
  • nitrile gloves worn, and the box of them within reach
  • sandwich wrap, stacked at the station
  • use-first sticker rolls on the shelf, where they are used
  • a use-first sticker already on a squeeze bottle, dated in marker

Nothing here is arranged for a camera, which is the only version an inspector ever sees.

The same photograph of the line, read for its detail: two red sanitation buckets, one with a knife handle standing in it; a box of nitrile gloves on the shelf beside a receipt printer; two rolls of red USE FIRST stickers; a stack of sandwich wrap; and squeeze bottles labeled and dated in marker, one carrying a USE FIRST sticker, above pans of shredded lettuce, sliced tomato and house pickle.
The same frame, read for what is in it

03

The box that travels

Making ten sandwiches is not the same problem as making a hundred.

layeredsix movements per sandwich
choppedone

Across a hundred sandwiches that is six hundred movements against a hundred, and the sandwich still holds after an hour in a box.

The catering card: a black header with the wordmark and the alligator, a cream band carrying boxed lunches at fifteen dollars a head and platters at fourteen, upgrades, and a boxed office sampler at $275 feeding up to twenty with no substitutions, then six sandwiches on black below, two of them described as chopped and tossed in a sauce.
The catering card

What it cost

Edits, on one box.

The office sampler takes no substitutions and no requests: the shop chooses what goes in it. That is why it gets pushed, best value for the customer and fastest for the kitchen. Boxed lunches and platters can still be worked around.

It has not needed me since February.

What held

The menu structure
The order, the categories, the way it is read. Unchanged.
The kitchen zoning
Hot before the press, cold after, packing last. Unchanged.
The daily operation
Run by people who did not design it, with me a state away.
The seats still open
The room trades covers for flow on every service, and six months of other people running it has not settled the argument.
Two people standing in front of the yellow alligator panel in the dining room, arms folded, holding up a health inspection certificate scored 100.
The score, and the two people it belongs to

What design can and cannot claim

100health scorethree inspections

Strong contribution. Rotation, labeling, clean-down, recipe systems, and station design were built around safe, repeatable handling. The inspections were scored by people with no reason to flatter us.

5.0Google rating

Contributed. I designed and distributed 300 review cards during opening, and the brand, packaging, and customer experience helped shape what people reviewed. The rating itself belongs to the food, service, and team too.

7months to break even

Partial contribution. Speed of service, catering workflows, packaging decisions, and building rather than fully fitting out helped. So did rent, food cost, my dad, and the realities of the town.

Built across

Identity
Sketched by hand, drawn in Illustrator
Print + fabrication
Menus, catering card, stickers, review card, door lettering, and custom stencil
Web
Squarespace, with online ordering through DoorDash
Built by hand
Wall table, live-edge table, stencil and spray work, paint
Systems
Component recipes, batch scaling, cooler rotation, line layout, staff handoffs