Campaigns are where the breadth of what we can do really shines, and we’ve polished off some gems this year. We’re in the midst of a ‘uuuuuge one, Square’s Masterclass Series, ‘In Service’, so watch this space for a Feb 2025 launch.

This year saw us concept, art direct, produce and manage the amplification for no less than 18 campaigns for Big Booze Hounds William Grant & Sons. We brought to life a Grand Cabaret on stage for Hendrick’s, combined Gucci with Glenfiddich and put our pedal to the metal when it came to the world of high-class cocktails, *clink*.

We took Icebergs to the open water, assisting with the launch of their culinary experience on board the luxury superyacht, Sirenuse, and filled our heads and hearts with hot spicy tenders for Belles Hot Chicken’s Feed Me promo. For Breville, we fizzed, sizzled and sipped espresso for multiple product campaigns this year, shooting content for the 50th anniversary of the iconic jaffle being the crisp, cheesy corner on another wonderful year together.

On the border of Surry Hills and Redfern blooms Wunderlich Lane, and our first (but not last) precinct launch campaign with premium developers, TOGA. We introduced the precinct to the public via a series that showcased the premium pedigree of the collection of venues within, with more to come in 2025.

The icing on the campaign cake, however, came in the form of a nomination for Best Campaign With a Small Budget in the Mumbrella Travel Marketing Awards for our Valentine’s Day ‘Get a Room’ Campaign with our friends at QT hotels. You can view more about this campaign here!

Openings. The adrenaline, the build delays, the construction-sites-turned-shoot-sets, the menu tastings, the previews, the angst, the joy, we love it all! This year proved fruitful on the new venue front, with the final dish off the pass, Olympus by The Apollo Group, opening in very early December, and what a show-stopper it is.

Love Tilly Group is never one for quiet time, and we assisted with the launches of not one, not two, but three new venues for the guys this year, with the opening of Fabbrica Pasta Bars in both Newtown and Darlo, plus the moody, sexy Letra House which opened in the space beneath Palazzo Salato just this month.

Also on Wunderlich Lane are the soon-to-open Lottie and Bar Julius by Liquid & Larder, a duo which will add a beautiful dose of the group’s polished hospitality to Redfern.  Up in Brisbane we assisted with reinventing the offering of the ramen and vinyl filled B-Side, above Yoko at Howard Smith Wharves, crafting a full new identity with accompanying content art direction (more on this below!), launch content planning and execution.

Don’t sleep on your website copy, you should refresh it every couple of years to ensure it still matches your message and the customer you’re looking to entice. It’s also one of our favourite services! We do it all the time for ourselves over on our own editorial platform, Lazy Susan.

We loved working on a full wingspan of copy projects this year, from the naming of a new cookie dough retail line from our favs at Cut Lunch Deli (coming soon!) to a website top-to-toe for premium Sydney caterers, Cook + Waiter, and email newsletter for Wunderlich Lane — complete with a swish design built from scratch.

We once again supported our old mates at Archie Rose Distilling Co with their brilliant journal (if we do say so ourselves), editing regular issues that lit a spotlight on their partnerships, stockists, team, events and huge number of creative collaborateurs. Lastly, we’ve been DEEP in the editorial side of a new campaign for Square, launching in February 2025, in which we interview a clutch of the industry’s most revered players to mine their advice. Watch this space for plenty of hot piping tea.

Our friends at Yoko in Brisbane flipped the track on their upstairs dining room, transforming the space into a Japanese Izakaya inspired record bar complete with slurp-worthy ramen, delicate tempura and the bounciest buns.

We were tasked with re-imagining B-Side’s identity, launching it with a social campaign for which we dove into clips of 1980s Japanese city pop, vintage menu ads and anime, emeshing those with clips of the characters of Yoyogi Park. For the logo, we kept it simple, strong and bold, inspired by ’90s RnB album art, resulting in an identity that BEAMS off signage, menus and in-venue collateral.

Movement is key, perhaps we’ll tattoo that to our foreheads? The Buffet production team was in full flight this year, producing video campaign after video campaign (16 in total!) for our boozy friends at William Grant & Sons, plus more for Fink and Breville. We had the major honour of documenting Pilu Freshwater’s 20th year — before being served lobster pasta after the shoot had wrapped. One for the books.

Up in Brisbane we crouched on the passes of Anyday Hospitality‘s beautiful venues in the name of high-impact video (this is maybe one of our favourite pieces of the year?). Also on the books was schooling Ragazzi’s pasta obsessives in how to make perfect pansotti. Did we mention that time we spent on a yacht? With simply too many vision projects to count on all our fingers, behold, our video Hype Reel of 2024:

Smartphone content continued to reign supreme this year and has continued to evolve the way we think about how content (especially motion) shows up on socials. Lo-fi video has fed into many major campaigns, content strategies and day-to-day shoots for the brands and restaurants we serve. This saw us deliver our highest number of Buffet Smartphone Workshops to date, empowering hospitality groups and in-house teams to capture service moments on-the-fly.

The week of the 15th of July, 2024 will be remembered by our production team as the biggest on record, with no less than 16 shoots in five days (that’s three shoots a day, folks). We love to see it. This was only possible this year by expanding our brilliant photographic team. With a stacked roster of talent from Hugh Davison and Jerrie-Joy Redman-Lloyd on Belles Hot Chicken to Dexter Kim on B-Side, Tom Wholohan on Archie Rose, Jana Langhorst on Salt Box, Joshua Bentley on Hendrick’s and Parker Blain on Wunderlich Lane. Keep your eyes peeled in 2025 for some of our best portraiture work yet for Square, lensed by Nikki To and Parker Blain. As always, this team is backed up by the best art directors and producers in the biz — a special shout out to the Buffet creative and production teams. See the full set here.

Maybe our proudest moment yet for Lazy Susan was when it was included as the key reference in a client brief. “Just do what you usually do!” Ok! This year we interviewed brilliant restauranteurs, movers and shakers, visionary stylists and That Sign Guy. We’ve pondered the death of UGC, re-wrote the New Rules of Instagram and peppered our own Head of Content with questions about cults. Have a question you want answered, or want us to pick the mind of someone truly great? Hit us up with a request, we love taking them!

What didn’t happen in the Buffice this year? We did, in fact, birth three baby boys, launched and sold out a brand new card game, added two new members to our core team (Meg Lacey as Content Coordinator, Tilly Christie as Junior Producer), welcomed back Nathalie Rolando as Graphic Designer and signed the lease on a brand new space (with air con!) we’re proud to be moving into in early 2025. As always, one-billion Mecca Coffee espressos were consumed, matched only by the number of cold Seltzer OK!s.