Brand manifesto, communication platform, and tone of voice for Cairo’s first bao burger spot.
The Context
Egypt had never seen a gua bao before BaoGr. The concept was simple to explain; Asian bun, burger inside. The product itself sat in a gap with no name, no reference point, and no existing audience. Nobody was asking for it because nobody knew they could.
A new venue opening in Heliopolis in 2020, BaoGr was bringing something genuinely foreign to a market that hadn’t encountered it. The first problem to solve was the name itself. Before you could build an audience, you had to build a frame; before you could sell a bun, you had to make people understand what a bao was, and why they should care.
The Thinking
The brief opened with comparative research. I mapped the landscape over three months of social listening. Domestically, Bao Buns and Shock’s Burgers covered adjacent ground, with O’Mama showing how far a young brand can ride on sharp copy and pop-culture fluency. Internationally, Little Bao in Hong Kong and BAO London set the benchmark for what a bao brand could be at its best.
The brands that worked all shared one thing: a strong sense of self. BAO London carried personality across every touchpoint; Shock’s built a visual world you could step into. Menu size had little to do with it.
The insight I landed on was geographic. The bao started in Northern China; it took its modern form in New York; and now it was arriving in Cairo’s East. A food that had spent its whole life migrating, always landing somewhere new, always adapting, never losing itself. The journey gave the brand a character to inhabit.
The Work
The deliverables were a brand manifesto, a communication platform, and a tone of voice. I built the manifesto first, written in first person and voiced by the bao itself. The point was to give the product a personality before the brand had one; something every later piece of communication could anchor to.
It runs from origin to arrival, following the bao from one East to another.
What am I? I’m a few things.
I’m easy to make, but hard to master.
I’m soft inside and out, but my legacy is strong.
I’m an edible movie star, with a texture of my own.
I’m an icon from the far East, evolving in the west, and traveling around the waking world.
I am the bao, and you don’t know me well enough just yet.But you will. Just like you, I’m a vessel ready to take on all the good things life has to offer. I give your favorite eats a whole new dimension; a juicy burger, a crunchy bit of chicken, or all the ice cream you can handle. And I’m coming to your neighborhood. I won’t be far; I’ll always be nearby.
I came from the East, and it’s where I belong. But nobody said which East it has to be. So it’s time you got to know me. It’s time you got to experience my story. My culture; my evolution; my trials and tribulations. My buns. The baoest buns around.
The Baoest Buns Around
The platform falls out of the manifesto’s last line. It does two things at once. On the surface it’s a straight quality claim; these are the best buns, full stop. Underneath, “baoest” is a word that didn’t exist before this brand. It borrows the Egyptian Arabic instinct to pile superlatives onto anything and bends it into English, landing on a word that belongs to both languages without fully committing to either. That’s the point.
For a brand introducing a foreign food to a local audience, the language had to meet people halfway. “Baoest” feels familiar even though it’s brand new; easy to say, easy to remember, hard to peel away from the product it describes. It’s also modular, ready to stretch across campaigns: the easiest, the creamiest, the most versatile bun around.
The tone of voice followed the same logic. Cool without pandering, with pop culture used as seasoning rather than the meal. Conversational, building simple bridges to a young, internet-fluent audience instead of hiding behind a corporate front. And no expensive words; tasty does the job that “delectable” only pretends to.
Why This Work Matters to Me
The tagline is still live. Five years, two locations, and the ordering site still leads with “The Baoest Buns Around.” That’s the result I value most: durability. A line that holds across time and growth is doing real structural work.
BaoGr also taught me something I’ve carried into every brief since. The most useful thing a copywriter can do for a new brand is give it a voice before it has an audience. The product can change, the visuals can evolve, the footprint can grow; if the words are right, the brand already knows who it is.
Project: Brand Manifesto, Communication Platform & Tone of Voice | Role: Copywriter | Year: 2020 | Client: BaoGr