We first met Loungers, professionally (as we’ve always been huge fans of the brand), when their design agency needed someone to help do some technical work for their Cosy Club Campaign Monitor templates. As is always the way, the help was needed yesterday and we were happy to oblige!

A phone call from the Commercial Director of Loungers one Christmas Eve meant January kick started with a very urgently needed corporate site. At that point we didn’t officially know Loungers were about to become a PLC, but the signs where there! Once it was publicly announced, we helped with phase 2 of the website which included all the regulatory filings and charts and data. We ensured the website was up to date at 7am when legally required – with Loungers only paying for the level of cleverness they actually needed.

Next, we were invited to pitch to take over the care of the main Lounges and Cosy Club websites. The previous design agency who had built them were keen to focus on design rather than technical infrastructure and, as the first place everyone who connected to Wifi in a Lounge was taken to, the websites were receiving a large amount of traffic. We assessed their requirements, found a new (cheaper) hosting provider, and carried out 2 large site migrations to move them. All went went seamlessly and caused no downtime or issues.

We’ve suggested various changes to Lounges web pages over the years, such as introducing a new block on the home page that gives them opportunity to shout about their speciality menus and accommodations for kids and pets – the things that make Lounges special, but which were just easily-missed icons previously. We also identified issues such as the post code look up not always working properly, and so made improvements to the whole process of finding your nearest Lounge, including reducing the amount of clicks required to find a particular menu or restaurant. We’ve also done the same for Cosy Club, introducing a map to let people find their nearest restaurant, and raising the profile of their party / event spaces.

We helped Cosy Club completely rebrand their website when all of their branding and assets changed… but with minimal changes to the website in order to help budgets. We worked with their design agency to help everyone understand how fonts, colours and images could be switched in the most time-efficient way, to give the biggest impact and completely suit the new branding being installed in all of the locations, without taking very long or costing very much.

Allergen matrices (TenKites), booking widgets (ResDiary), mailing lists (MailChimp, AirShip and others), feedback systems and jobs are just some of the integrations we’ve worked on with Loungers – besides the obvious API integrations such as Google Maps. This includes soft-launching some menus for certain locations during a trial, or devising ways for the admin team to easily manage hundreds of locations which are divided into price bands.

Everything we’ve done for Lounges and Cosy Club always has SEO in mind, and we advise the team on any change requests as to the impact this could have. Events and offers need to be handled carefully with a chain of restaurants so as to avoid thin or duplicate content, and ensure people can find what’s local and relevant to them without using JavaScript or filters which makes things harder for Google and AI to surface.

During the Pandemic, with rules changing constantly about what hospitality venues were and weren’t allowed to do, we were always available to quickly spin up new messaging on the site – via banners, or pop ups – with different messaging required across hundreds of locations depending on which could be staffed and which had outside space.

Each year Loungers run an epic staff mini-festival, and each year it has a different theme. We update the simple WordPress landing page we built them to carry the year’s theme and help them collect and sort the data from the thousands of team members who want to attend.

We worked with Loungers to very quickly turn around a website for Brightside, their roadside dining chain of restaurants which launched in 2023. Once the first restaurant was officially given the go ahead, it was a quick turn around for their design agency to prepare the branding and site design and us spin up the WordPress website – which then needed to evolve as the next restaurants opened. From the original website designs we were given, we created a “flexi page” so that the team could spin up new pages of any content they needed to introduce offers and stories to help with the restaurant chain launch.