A simple night out no longer satisfies today’s audience. People are looking for something more: an experience that’s engaging, competitive, social, and, ideally, worthy of sharing. This is the rise of competitive socialising: challenge your friends (or your partner) to a game of skill and you’re set for a great evening. Win and you celebrate; lose and you still win – because you’re already in a bar.
In Leicester, this space is defined by Caddyshackers and East Street Lanes. Created by the team behind the Steamin’ Billy pub company, Caddyshackers launched as the city’s first indoor crazy-golf venue, while East Street Lanes followed as the city centre’s only dedicated bowling alley.
With Caddyshackers selling out nightly in its first three months, it was clear that competitive socialising was a winning formula. But early success also meant competition wouldn’t be far behind. To stay ahead, both venues needed bold, memorable branding that would stand out, scale with demand, and remain firmly rooted in the Leicester nightlife scene.
Arch Creative were tasked with elevating the Caddyshackers and East Street Lanes brands, ensuring each identity captured the spirit of competitive socialising while appealing directly to the audiences who make these venues thrive.
Both brands needed to be developed entirely from scratch, from logos, typography and tone of voice to full brand guidelines, venue imagery, menu designs and a complete interactive website to handle bookings. And that was before we began producing ongoing campaign work to promote the venues once they launched.
For Caddyshackers, the brief drew partial inspiration from other successful inner-city golf concepts, but the goal was clear: create a brand that was bold, unusual and shareable. The visual identity needed to capture the weird and wonderful personality of the venue into a look that felt unmistakably its own. The eccentricity isn’t just for show; it reflects the very essence of “crazy, crazy golf.” The more unexpected and off-beat the experience, the more memorable and Instagrammable it becomes.
But the eccentricity needed structure. The online experience had to balance the brand’s wildness with clarity and usability. The Caddyshackers website was designed to do both: showcasing the venue’s character through distinctive graphics, playful copy and video, while also guiding visitors smoothly toward making a booking. It quickly became a central part of the brand ecosystem and a key driver of sales across the venue’s various offerings.
East Street Lanes opened a few months after Caddyshackers. Although the two venues share the same building on Calais Hill, they are entirely separate brands with distinct personalities. For East Street Lanes, our task was to capture the spirit of 1950s diner and bowlarama culture, drawing inspiration from American Graffiti and the broader nostalgia of classic Americana.
We developed a full suite of brand assets, from the logo and menus to a series of social videos designed to build a strong online following. As with Caddyshackers, we established a clear tone of voice and created an interactive website that gives East Street Lanes a polished, engaging digital presence.
At Arch Creative, we believe the strongest agencies are the ones that act proactively. When we realised East Street Lanes’ reopening fell on the same day as a major pop-culture release, we saw an opportunity to tap into the excitement and amplify the relaunch.
Our campaign imagined an otherworldly visitor, a giant bowling ball crashing down in Leicester, causing playful havoc as it rolled through the streets toward the East Street Lanes venue. It was a bold, attention-grabbing concept designed to ride the wave of cultural buzz and make the reopening impossible to ignore.
A high-concept idea is all well and good, but you need the expertise to pull it off. Our in-house animators relish a challenge, and created an effects-driven film with a side of humour. We included the central CGI bowling ball, complete with an eerie, unearthly glow, glitch effects to denote alien interference and some (virtual) damage to Leicester scenery.
In addition to our effects, we enlisted the help of ESL staff and a few other local Leicester businesses for acting support. This was a job with a tight turnaround time given the scope, and drove huge amounts of business to ESL on the first days of opening.
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