Kindling UK - multi-brand restaurant group website design

Kindling UK is the British edition of our fictional multi-brand quick-service restaurant group, headquartered in London. It shares every template with the US edition but reads as a British company: the Food Standards Agency and the HSE instead of the FDA and OSHA, system sales in pounds, workplace pensions, bank holidays and a heritage editorial palette.

Project facts

• Client: Kindling Brands Ltd, registered in England & Wales (fictional)
• Sector: Multi-brand quick-service restaurant group
• Markets: London head office with restaurants across the UK
• Services: Market localisation · Copywriting · Brand adaptation · Restaurant group website design · Accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA) · SEO foundations
• Templates: 42 page templates shared with every Kindling Brands edition
• Stack: Hand-built HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript; one strings file and one theme file per market

The brief

A restaurant group site that sounds like a British plc

Investors, franchisees and job seekers expect understated confidence, not American superlatives. The UK edition swaps every regulator, figure and season: the Food Standards Agency, HSE and Environment Agency, the CMA and FCA, workplace pensions instead of 401(k), and bank holidays instead of Thanksgiving.

Designing for the United Kingdom

What actually changed between the US and this edition

• Headquarters - US edition: Austin, Texas · United Kingdom: London
• Entity - US edition: Kindling Brands Inc. · United Kingdom: Kindling Brands Ltd, registered in England & Wales
• Figures - US edition: $5.2B system sales · United Kingdom: System sales in pounds sterling
• Regulators - US edition: FDA, OSHA, EPA, FTC, SEC · United Kingdom: Food Standards Agency, HSE, Environment Agency, CMA, FCA
• Benefits - US edition: 401(k), Social Security · United Kingdom: Workplace pension, National Insurance
• Seasonal - US edition: Thanksgiving · United Kingdom: Bank holidays, Christmas
• Look - US edition: Cream, ember red, saffron; Fraunces + Bricolage Grotesque · United Kingdom: Paper, heritage green, oxblood; Newsreader + Instrument Sans

stills/ (to record)

Brand adaptation

The same Kindling Brands, with a local accent

Heritage green and paper carry the interface, with oxblood for actions and italic emphasis and a deep forest for dark panels; every pairing passes WCAG AA. Newsreader gives headlines a measured, editorial voice and Instrument Sans keeps forms and navigation plain. The hearth-arch logomark and the Brands wordmark are unchanged.

Homepage and key journeys

A full-bleed dining-room hero eases in, a ribbon of the four brand names leads into a word-by-word statement, and live counters tick up to restaurants, team members and system sales in pounds. The page flows into brand cards, strategy, impact and newsroom. The most distinctive flow is the newsroom: filter chips for Press, Story, Snapshot and Video combine with a brand selector and a shareable ?brand= URL.

Compliance, accessibility and trust

• Privacy notice under the UK GDPR and PECR naming Kindling Brands Ltd as controller, with opt-in cookie consent.
• Footer with a Companies House line, registered office in London and VAT number.
• Food safety and allergen information follows Food Standards Agency guidance; no US regulators.
• Passes automated WCAG 2.2 AA checks on every page at 360, 390, 768 and 1440 px: no contrast failures, no unreachable controls, no horizontal scrolling.
• A language switcher built from hreflang sits in the header on desktop and in the footer on phones.

One system, twelve markets

Every visible string lives in one file per market, and every colour and typeface in one theme file. This edition needed no new templates or components: a strings file, a theme, regional photography and local legal content made it a different brand experience. For a restaurant group with international plans, a new market becomes a content project rather than a rebuild.

Deliverables

• Market profile: language, formats, legal and seasonality
• Full localised copy across 42 templates, header, footer and forms
• Brand adaptation: palette, type pairing and logo descriptor
• 29 regional photographs (Pexels, credited in credits.json)
• Local legal content
• Accessibility pass (WCAG 2.2 AA, automated) and QA at four screen widths
• Portfolio media: stills, full-page captures, scroll video, OG image, brand board