Global Expansion to Direct Bookings

Sushi Samba is a restaurant group like no other. Fusing Japanese, Brazilian and Peruvian cuisine with vibrant cocktails and a buzzing atmosphere built for celebration, the brand has carved out a distinct position in the premium dining market with venues across Europe, the USA, the Middle East and Asia.

Their restaurants are also a natural home for events and special occasions, they consistently attract guests who expect the experience to be exceptional from the moment they land online.

When a brand delivers this much in person, the bar for the digital experience is high. Sushi Samba’s primary goal has always been straightforward: turn online interest into direct bookings.

With a global estate and a premium audience, the digital journey needed to work harder, reducing friction, inspiring confidence, and making the path from discovery to reservation feel as effortless as the brand itself.

When the Samba Room opened in Heron Tower, the challenge sharpened. This opening means starting with no search presence, no existing audience, and no margin for a slow build. The team needed to generate awareness fast, drive early demand, and fill coverage from day one.

Propeller’s work with Sushi Samba spans both long term digital infrastructure and targeted campaign activity. For the Samba Room launch, we ran a focused SEO and paid media campaign on the existing website, establishing search presence for Samba Room specific terms and reaching the right audiences through paid channels before and after opening day.

Alongside this, we designed and built a brand new headless website for Sushi Samba. Mobile first by design, the site was built with user experience and accessibility at its core, but the complexity of the build went deeper than that.

With venues spread across Europe, the USA, the Middle East and Asia and new locations opening in Milan and Los Angeles, one of the challenges was finding the right way to present a global estate without overwhelming the user. The answer was built into the navigation and homepage hero, where locations are organised by region, making it intuitive for a guest to find their nearest venue and understand what’s on offer there.

The booking flow required an equally considered approach. Sushi Samba’s venues each offer multiple reservation options, and the previous centralised reservations page wasn’t doing justice to that complexity. We moved to dedicated reservation pages for each venue, cleaning up the design, reducing decision fatigue, and making it far easier for guests to find exactly the booking they were looking for. The result is a digital experience that finally matches the ambition and scale of the brand it represents.