RAISING THE BARCODE

Written By: Robert Cocuzzo | Photography By: Georgie Morley

Happy Place’s Holly Finigan reinvents the restaurant guide with Flowcodes.

Holly Finigan at a beach spread created by ACK Picnics.

Of all the industries that have been forced to reinvent themselves amid the coronavirus pandemic, few have been more impacted than restaurants. Whether it was ramping up to-go service, redefining waiter protocols or reimagining outdoor seating configurations, Nantucket’s restaurant scene has exhibited remarkable nimbleness in continuing to deliver the high-caliber culinary experience for which the island is famous. In this spirit of creativity flourishing in confines, a longtime advocate of Nantucket’s restaurant scene, Holly Finigan, has reinvented the restaurant guidebook.

“I worked in the restaurant industry on Nantucket for my first ten years on-island, so the local dining establishments have always had a special place in my heart,” said Finigan. Partnering with summer residents Tim Armstrong and Jim Norton, Finigan launched the Happy Place Dining Sourcebook, a complimentary restaurant guide that incorporates cutting-edge Flowcodes to keep diners up to date with their favorite restaurants. When you hold your phone’s camera over the Flowcode on each page, a link pops up to bring users to the restaurant’s Flowpage where its menu, hours of operation, reservation link and all other pertinent information are available. While traditional restaurant guides feature static samples of menus that typically change throughout the season, the Flowcodes enable restaurateurs to continually update their menu for digital viewing.

Finigan’s Sourcebook has brought cutting-edge QR Code technology to the restaurant guide.

Flowcodes are the creation of the DTX Company, which is run by Armstrong and Norton. Although QR codes have been in existence for nearly thirty years, DTX has made the technology far more user-friendly, while also making the codes themselves more visually appealing. Businesses can design their own codes at Flowcode.com to harness this technology that is on full display not only in the Sourcebook, but also at the restaurants themselves where most owners have jettisoned physical menus for Flowcodes.

While the DTX Company made the Sourcebook’s technology possible, Finigan enlisted additional partners in launching this new Happy Place endeavor. She teamed up with Courtney Owens and Brittany Katz of Cobbleside, a social media platform designed for local restaurants offering “cobbleside” pickup as well as outdoor and indoor dining. “The Cobbleside girls helped in data gathering,” explained Finigan, “so that we could be 100 percent inclusive in listing all the island’s restaurants, eateries and markets.” All of these establishments were featured entirely free-of-charge, which was made possible by more than a dozen “Launch Partners” who helped Finigan raise over $50,000 to produce and distribute the Sourcebook.

“In the beginning of the book, we wrote ‘You’ll always remember where you were the summer of 2020,’” said Finigan. “My hope is that the Sourcebook becomes a coffee table staple to help consumers this year and remind them in the future how our beloved restaurant community evolved together to rise up and serve Nantucket in a new way.” Happy Place represents a personal and professional evolution for Finigan, who is most known on the island for Nantucket blACKbook, the marketing strategy business she founded in 2012. This offseason, Finigan fully transitioned Nantucket blACKbook to Happy Place in an effort to “set a new stage for creative marking, community building and higher consciousness.” In the year ahead, Finigan will be building out her Happy Place platform, while continuing to contribute to the community as she has for decades.

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