Are you an a small and medium-sized business (SMB) owner looking for time-saving and cost-efficient ways for branded marketing creatives? In today’s highly competitive market, having a strong brand presence is crucial, and AI offers a cost-efficient and time-saving solution for SMB owners who want to make their mark. In this blog, we will learn from Beau, the owner of a succesful BBQ business Devils Pit BBQ, about how he used AI to supercharge their branding efforts and create a brand that stands out.

Beau, like many SMB owners, started Devils Pit Barbecue as a side hustle just before the pandemic. To his surprise, the business grew rapidly, leading to the establishment of the company as a food processing plant. Mass production of smoked goods is their specialty, with sauces, frozen items, and merchandise available for purchase on their website. To further promote their brand, they operate a food trailer that participates in marketing events. The business sets up shop at Smith’s Food and Drug locations throughout Utah and focuses on large events during the warmer months.

When asked why he picked the devel theme, Beau shared that, “I had a friend suggest Devils Pit for the name, since we both grew up in Utah and around the Mormon faith. With churches on every corner and temples in almost every major city, Devils Pit Barbecue really stands out.” Beau calls himself Lucifer Morningstar. It started as a joke but his customer base has increased from it.

Since the beginning of this year, Beau realized that he needed to step up his branding game to grow his business. That’s when he started exploring the power of AI to accelerate his efforts. There are 2 ways that Beau has been using OpenArt’s tech for his brand efforts:

1. To create more logos for their main barbecue products. Each meat and sauce has a unique logo.
2. To create apprel with the Pandora’s Box theme.  It’s 100% heaven-approved, so long as the viewer can keep their mind out of the gutter.

Before AI, Beau used to work with local and international artists for his logos, which usually took weeks to finalize. With OpenArt, he creates logos and visuals in a fraction of the time. OpenArt generates dozens of unique options in seconds, allowing Beau to streamline branding efforts and devote more time to his business. The stunning visuals accurately capture his brand’s essence – the Devil theme.

Here is he specific process how he does it:

• He trains his own AI image generator with OpenArt by uploading his anime characters he likes, which include historical devils, mythological devils and real life devils (10-20 images will be enough).
• He waits for the training which takes 30 min.
• He types what he wants to see as a prompt. In some instances he will use Wiki description for what he’s looking for. In other instances, he has to do a bit more research. Then his personalized AI image generator will generate hundreds of images following the desirable style based on his prompt.
• When typing prompts to generate images, he will typically first create 8 images to see if they are about the quality he’s looking for. If not, he will tweak the prompt. Once he gets a consistent quality, he will have the OpenArt AI generate 200-400 images and amongst them he will find 4-5 good images that could go onto a product.
• From there he will mock them up, to see which one fits just right.

Getting images from AI is 1,000x faster, the cost is also dramatically lower. I’m not an artist when it comes to drawing, but AI has helped me to become just that and enable my creativity to its fullest potential.

Beau admitted that there was a learning curve with AI – the first few models didn’t work out as well as he hoped but he kept trying and finally got things working really well.

His personalized branded AI model also allows Beau to grow his merchandise business. Beau uses a similar process as the above to produce BBQ-related anime characters for tshirts. Here is a t-shirt with an AI-generated anime character with the Pandora’s Box theme. Beau said that their designs with AI are intentionally borderline offensive, but 100% heaven approved at the same time. “After all the DEVIL made me do it, oh wait I’m the devil!”, Beau joked.

After experiencing all the benefits of AI, Beau strongly advocates for OpenArt’s technology and encourages business owners, artists, designers, and marketers to try it out. According to him,

I believe that once people can see that it doesn’t take away from the artist’s creativity, but amplifies their ability to create faster, that it will explode and be one of the biggest disruptors to the way of our time!

If you read this far, you should definitely give the delicious Devils Pit BBQ a try and show your support to a great SMB owner! If you’re out of state, you can purchase their 30 different flavors of barbecue sauce in 3 bases and their Dante’s Inferno 9 Degrees of heat (810) possibilities. Beau’s on a grand journey of adding a different style of barbecue sauce for all 50 states in the USA. Merchandise is currently available here and they will be releasing our Pandora’s Box line t-shirt everyday for the next 666 days. If you live in Utah, Beau posts a schedule of where their truck will be on all their social media pages.

If you are also a SMB owner thinking of taking your brand to the next level, start training your own AI image generator today on OpenArt and revolutionize the way you create and market your brand!