Danes Specialty Coffee
Define yourself.
Brand strategy · Identity · Packaging · Total design
Danes Specialty Coffee had been roasting for twenty-eight years and had trained world champion baristas. None of it was visible to the customer standing at the counter.
The insight was simple: if you educate the customer on what coffee can be, they stop leaving. An uneducated customer who doesn't like their coffee goes next door. An educated one asks what they might like instead.
"Define Yourself" was the brand line. The pentagon made it literal — five dimensions of flavour, scored and plotted for every blend. Every customer's preference produced a unique version of the mark. Theirs alone.
They moved on experienced staff who couldn't grow into the new brand. The business grew 400%. The project was the only non-digital entry in a global design book on dynamic branding.
"We thought we were getting a rebrand. What we implemented was a fresh vision of our entire business." — Paul Jackson, Managing Director, Danes Specialty Coffee
Before & After
Rebrand and packaging update - Increasing perceived value by design
“We thought we were getting a rebrand, but what we got was a fresh vision of our entire business - from the way we think, the way we operate, to the ambition we now carry.”
Paul Jackson, Founder
Danes Specialty Coffee
We wanted to deliver our target customer a comfortable and ‘consciously analogue’ mid-century modernist feel as a break from our digitally connected lives, and differentiate from the commonplace ‘industrial style’ cafes.
The iconic blend of technology and craft of that mid-century era is paralleled in the process of creating an intensely flavourful espresso from a flavourless un-roasted bean.
We leveraged their expertise and insight to provide access to a high level of measurement and precision that we deployed visually across the brand touch points.
Each interaction with the brand was seen as a way to share their knowledge and offer the customer greater choice and a power to decide what suits them. ‘Define Yourself’ becoming a guiding principle throughout the business.