Landing in Barcelona: the Consell de Cent opening
Garden Pizza · flagship launch plan, press and creator relations · June – September 2026
Garden Pizza had six restaurants, all of them outside Barcelona: Sant Cugat, Terrassa, Mataró, Igualada. The brand was known in its own towns and invisible in the city it was named after. Consell de Cent was the first flagship inside Barcelona, with a longer menu and a higher ambition than any venue before it.
A city opening is not the same as a town opening. In Barcelona nobody is waiting for another pizzeria. The launch had to earn attention, not announce itself.
The plan
Two tracks, run in parallel and deliberately kept apart. Press, for authority: a small number of outlets with real editorial weight in Barcelona, to make the opening a fact of the city rather than a brand claim. Creators, for coverage and proof: a long, varied list of food accounts, from large reach to neighbourhood nano profiles, so the restaurant appeared again and again over three months instead of once on opening week.
One rule across the whole creator list: always a collaborative post, never only a tag.
What I did
I built and ran the whole launch plan: outlet and creator selection, outreach, negotiation, briefing, scheduling of visits, content validation and results tracking, from June to the end of September.
I negotiated the press placements myself with Time Out Barcelona and Diari ARA, defining the angle, validating the copy and the photography, and coordinating the shoots their teams ran on site.
I ran a creator programme of eleven published pieces across reach tiers and audience niches: generalist Barcelona food accounts, Catalan-language accounts, vegan accounts and nano profiles, with an individual brief for each one.
I produced the brand-side material used by the accounts that do not film on site, shooting it to their own audiovisual guidelines so the piece still looked native to their feed.
I set up the tracking that turned the campaign into data: one record per collaboration, with format, publication date, link, performance and a written conclusion, so the next launch starts from evidence instead of memory.
Results
14 pieces published: 3 media and 11 creator collaborations. 261,631 views across the 11 pieces with publicly visible figures, and 49,415 views on the single best-performing creator piece. Figures are the public counts on each post; pieces published without a collaborative credit, and collaborations that had not gone live yet, are listed but not counted.
Media
Time Out Barcelona · 30.09.2026 · Garden Pizza abre una flagship artesanal en Barcelona con una carta de alto nivel, plus a collaborative reel filmed by their own creators.
Diari ARA · 29.09.2026 · Garden Pizza ja és a Barcelona, plus a recommendation carousel · 64,648 views.
Barcelona Vegan Friendly · 06.08.2026 · collaborative reel · 63,886 views. It ran with a giveaway, so its engagement is not comparable to the rest.
Content creators
El Salmorejero · 03.08.2026 · collaborative reel · 49,415 views · 30 comments.
Azul GZZZ · 15.09.2026 · collaborative reel, plus TikTok and a Google review · 21,755 views · 28 comments.
Fuaquerida · 16.07.2026 · collaborative reel · 17,464 views · 17 comments.
Dey Bravo · 10.09.2026 · collaborative reel · 12,354 views. Already a customer before the campaign.
Let's Eat Barcelona · 29.09.2026 · collaborative reel, plus stories during the visit · 12,164 views · 18 comments.
Eat Vegan Barcelona · 30.09.2026 · collaborative reel, plus a two-day story sequence · 7,228 views · 20 comments.
Comer en Barcelona · 24.06.2026 · collaborative reel · 5,773 views · 24 comments.
Cuina BCN · 21.08.2026 · collaborative post, Catalan-language account · 3,815 views · 54 comments.
Sara RMS · 22.07.2026 · collaborative reel, nano profile used as UGC · 3,129 views · 16 comments.
Come To Eat · 19.07.2026 · reel · published as a tag only, with no shared credit.
Kiara Ledesma · 24.07.2026 · post · published as a tag only, with no shared credit.
What I learnt
Reach is not the variable that matters. The piece that travelled furthest was not the one with the biggest audience, but the one whose audience had never heard of the brand. The best performers were consistently the ones watched mostly by non-followers; the nano profile with the warmest audience was the weakest at acquisition, and the most useful for reusable content.
A collaborative post is worth asking for every single time. Two of the eleven creator pieces went out as a plain tag. They still appeared, but they left no shared audience and no data behind. From the third month onwards, shared authorship became a condition of the brief rather than a request.
A giveaway buys numbers, not evidence. The piece with the most comments of the whole campaign carried a prize draw. Counting it as proof that the vegan angle works would have been the easy conclusion and the wrong one, so it is reported separately.
Spreading the calendar beats concentrating it. Publications ran from late June to the end of September rather than clustering on opening week, so somebody in Barcelona saw the restaurant for the first time every few days for three months.
All figures are the counts publicly visible on each publication at the time of reporting. Collaborations agreed but not yet published are excluded. Commercial terms are not disclosed.