In this series, features and series developer Heather Nicholls takes you behind the scenes of some of the most compelling brand activations and events.
This week, we meet Nobody’s Cafe, the agency behind Tortilla Together.
The Brief:
Nobody’s Cafe has been working with Tortilla for over a year now.
The initial brief was centred around building the brand’s community – both from a content creator perspective and a wider new consumer lens.
This has included a mixutre of activations, ranging from supper clubs to fitness sessions at boutique boxing club JAB London, to touring American-style trucks, and a Winter party in-store partnering with independent fashion brand Ruby Loot.
David Ogiste, founder of Nobody’s Cafe said: “We’ve helped build that community over the past year, working together with the brand team to create each activation with that overall long-term goal always in mind.”
The Execution:
Nobody’s Cafe’s relationship with Tortilla began in early April of last year. Ogiste explained: “They came to us wanting to build a genuine community and elevate their brand experiences. Despite being a highly visible brand located on high streets and in train stations everywhere, they felt they hadn’t quite achieved the cultural cut-through seen by peers in the elevated convenience space. They were looking for an ongoing relationship to help them cement their place in culture, rather than just launching a one-off event.”
To answer this, the agency came up with the concept of ‘Tortilla Together’,
This began as the name of the first supper club, but it quickly evolved into the overarching ethos for the entire partnership. From an execution standpoint, the process began by sitting down with the brand team to understand their current objectives.
Ogiste said: “Often, this revolves around a new menu launch or specific brand message. Once the concept is locked in, the logistical execution requires close collaboration with Tortilla’s restaurant teams. Food quality is paramount, and ensuring a seamless experience off-site takes precise planning so that guests receive the exact same high-quality experience they would get sitting inside a Tortilla restaurant.”
In terms of inspiration, Ogiste explained: “While Tortilla’s core messaging dictates what we want to say, the inspiration for how we bring these activations to life comes from our years in the industry and our lives outside of work. We know the mechanics of what works because we’ve lived and breathed it—having delivered hundreds of supper clubs and vehicle activations previously, we know exactly how they drive engagement and build community.”
He adds: “But beyond industry experience, our biggest inspiration comes from stepping away from the desk and actually experiencing these trends firsthand. For example, I personally go to JAB Boxing in Victoria. I know exactly what the community and energy feel like in that space, so when we were looking for a wellness partnership, it made total sense. When you are genuinely living the trends, you can allow those real-world, authentic experiences to directly inspire and elevate the work you do for your clients.”
The first supper club “Tortilla Together”, is what kicked off the agency’s working relationship with the brand, allowing the agency to take those initial learnings and continue growing.
From there, they went on to launch the JAB London partnership, followed by a Winter Campaign, and most recently an American-style truck on Claphma Common.
Collaboration has been key throughout the relationship between Tortilla and Nobody’s Cafe. Ogiste said: “Our main goal with every project is to foster genuine collaboration among everyone who brings these brand experiences to life. Tortilla is a fantastic example of this in action. Across multiple campaigns, we’ve worked hand-in-hand with their internal brand and restaurant teams.”
He added: “We then expand that collaborative circle to include an incredible roster of external talent—from content creators, illustrators, and tattoo artists to brand partners like Ruby Loot and JAB Boxing, alongside various designers and photographers. Ultimately, it’s our role to orchestrate all these moving parts, ensuring everyone is working together toward the unified goal of delivering Tortilla’s messaging and amplifying engagement around every activation and new product launch.”
The results:
Ogiste said: “Each activation has been a great success. Every event has benefited from the lessons of the last, successfully hitting the specific goals we set out to achieve each time. We’ve seen these campaigns perform incredibly well in-person by building a tangible new community for the brand, and that energy has translated beautifully to social media, on Winter Warmer alone the activation generated an organic, unpaid reach of over 6 million.”
For Nobody’s Cafe, when measuring the outcomes of brand experience, the first and most important question the agency ask is: Did people enjoy it on the ground? Ogiste said: “For these activations, that has been a resounding yes.”
Beyond that immediate positive feedback, the agency has also achieved results across key areas:
- Repeat community engagement – The goal for these activations was community building. Therefore, a major success metric was seeing people return. There were content creators who attended the original ‘Tortilla Together’ supper club who showed up again for the JAB event and The Winter Warmer. This continued loyalty proved that the community is genuinely growing.
- Positive Social Sentiment – The feedback on social media from people who didn’t attend was just as important. There was a massive influx of comments from users asking for the activations to be bought to their own cities.
- Massive Organic Reach – The reach has been extremely positive. The Winter Warmer, in particular, generated huge numbers through our influencer network and the Ruby Loot partnership.
- Strategic Consistency – Perhaps the strongest outcome is that Tortilla has maintained consistency, running these activations almost every quarter. The more consistent a brand can be, the stronger their community becomes.
Trends and Learnings:
Ogiste said: “The biggest takeaway from this project is the immense value of a long lasting client relationship. It is so important for brands and agencies to work together over a number of years and across multiple activations. That ongoing relationship is where you gather deep learnings, evaluate what works, and continuously improve on everything being done time and time again. It allows you to build real momentum rather than starting from scratch every time.”
In terms of trends, Ogiste notes that the overarching trend right now in experiential marketing and brand activations is the shift from brand talking at consumers to talking with them.
To build into that authentic community across multiple events for Tortilla, Nobody’s Cafe leaned into several specific trends:
- The Plus-One Strategy – Content creators are often asked to attend activations alone, which leads to transactional content creation. By inviting creators to the events and encouraging them to bring a plus-one, they were able to experience the event with a friend. It feels like a genuine social gathering, and they naturally engage more deeply.
- Wellness & Lifestyle Integration – For the JAB London partnership, the agency tapped directly into the wellness trend, meeting the community in a space they already care about.
- Strategic Brand Partnerships – Partnering with independent fashion brand Ruby Loot added an exclusive, lifestyle-driven merchandise element that attendees loved.
- Vehicle Activations & Pre-Event Hype – Vehicles are a highly effective experiential trend. For the Clapham Common food truck, the agency ran a targeted social campaign with creators beforehand. The hype worked perfectly – even though it was raining, there were lines wrapping around the entire park waiting to get involved.
Ogiste added: “The best part of creating a client relationship where you have the opportunity to explore different activations and work together to test and learn different formats.”
He said: “We’ve had the chance to truly evaluate, tweak and improve on the activations we have done – they haven’t been the same but the learnings and lessons we take from each activation carry through to the next. Some of those have been simple learnings, like design language, but there are more complex understanding content creators and how we work with them and perhaps some of the activations could have benefitted from those learnings, but overall each activation has been a success.”