Kayla Bolyai Chief marketing officer

What is Altamarea group restaurants?

I'm Kayla Boye and I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for Alta Marea Group Restaurants. It is a restaurant hospitality group. We have 20 plus restaurants all over the world, headquartered in New York, and we were started in 2008.

What type of restaurants do you have?

Marea is our flagship restaurant, and Coastal Italian is the cuisine there, but we also in D.C. we have our Northern Italian concept, Osteria Marini, and in New York we also have AIfiori as well as 53, which we call Contemporary Asian.

How do you think people would describe the Altamarea Group’s collection of restaurants primarly in the US?

Initially people will say, Marea, I know Marea, Marea on Central Park South, I heard it just opened in Beverly Hills. That is definitely our marquee brand. So I think more and more we're getting more fluent in getting our audience to know that we're in a wide range of concepts. We're the solution provider when it comes to hospitality, so we're not a one size fits all firm.

How does the digital landscape play a role in the Altamarea Group’s overall operations and strategy?

We're looking to make sure that there's a seamless experience for the guests from online to in person. We really started focusing on that when it came to COVID. So if you weren't in the restaurant, how were you interacting with the brand if you were online? I think it's important to see how that translates from what you're doing online, and then is it an actual reflection of the experience in house.

What are you really trying to solve in partnering with Influence Society?

We engaged Influence Society to help build a website for Marea Beverly Hills, but what  we ended up getting as a result of working with them was this really bespoke, tailored solution that not only spoke to the essence of the location, they have different aesthetics from a design perspective in house, so how could that be reflected or what Influence Society ended up building for us online. The website for Marea Beverly Hills really outshone the website for Marea New York in the end, and so we ended up retaining Influence Society to come on board.

How do you find the Webflow technology and CMS?

We had created websites that were so basic that as the user on the back end, we were locked out of doing anything that really had impact. From there, I transitioned us to WordPress, which certainly gives a lot more flexibility on the back end, but in terms of what that actually looks like and feasibility of how it is to use, it's not a very user-friendly platform, and so Webflow really created this solution for both needs, but also doing it on a platform where the actual user experience on the front end of the site was actually reflective, again, of the high-end experience we offer in the restaurants.

What was you experience working with Influence Society?

The team was great. Everyone from when we first started having the conversation to when we set deadlines and deliverables, I felt sometimes that their team was better at keeping deliverables, which is good because everyone gets lost in the shuffle sometimes, so to have a partner in getting things done so the project doesn't fall to the wayside.

How the Altamarea Group’s relationship evolved since the first conversation with Influence Society?

Yeah, we keep retaining Influence Society because it's been such a pleasure to work with the Influence Society team and we're seeing such great results. Where we started, as I mentioned before, is with the Marea Beverly Hills website, needing something very solution-oriented, but then we realized that the capabilities expanded so much far beyond just building a website, so we've more recently retained Influence Society work with us on iFiori to help with our rankings and to really clean up our SEO on the back end of the site.

How would you describe your relationship with Influence Society?

I wouldn't have known about Webflow without Influence Society, so from a technical standpoint, it's great to have partners who are constantly in the space learning, getting the best products for them to use to then communicate it to the clients, not from a sales perspective, but more from a, this actually could be very valuable to what your goals are for your business. It doesn't necessarily have to start with a scope of work or a need, sometimes it's just, hey, we're running these, like, a look at what your analytics are. I think things like that, where it just starts an open conversation and that can then translate to a larger opportunity, it's really helpful and it makes me know that, like, we're going to always stay relevant and continue to evolve as our restaurants and our offerings do in-house.

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