Branding in Coffee Industry
- Jun 15, 2023
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 26
Coffee is one of the most branded industries and one of the most indistinguishable.
Walk into almost any specialty café or browse coffee brands online and you’ll see the same language repeated: earthy palettes, a bean silhouette, a curl of steam rising from a cup. Individually, it clearly communicates "this is coffee." Collectively, they communicate "this is the same as all the other coffee."
How coffee branding became a template
At some point, the industry settled into a visual formula. Over time, those signals stopped meaning anything on their own, because everyone started using them.
What began as differentiation turned into a category language. And once a language is shared by everyone, it stops being distinctive.
Why selling flavour is not enough
Most coffee branding still revolves around the product: roast profiles, tasting notes, origin details.
But the reality is, most customers don’t choose coffee based on nuanced flavour differences. The language of “citrus acidity” or “stone fruit notes” rarely drives decision-making in a meaningful way.
Coffee mostly tastes like coffee. When a product doesn't do much differentiating, the brand has to. And most coffee brands aren't built for that job — they're built to match the category.
What people actually respond to is something simpler: recognition, trust, and alignment. When everything tastes “good enough”, the decision shifts away from flavour entirely.
This is where most coffee brands miss the opportunity. They continue to describe the product, when in reality, they’re competing in perception.
Build something a competitor couldn't reuse
Coffee doesn't taste different. You do.
Unless your audience is specialty drinkers who'll drive across town for a specific single origin, taste isn't the purchase driver. The decision is emotional — how the coffee fits into someone's morning, their identity, their desk ritual, their health routine, their team's afternoon reset.
Own the emotional territory, not the bean.
Energy.
Quiet.
Community.
Ritual.
Craft.
Whatever the brand strategy points to.
The takeaway cup is a billboard you already paid for
Surprisingly branded cups are very underestimated in coffee branding. Every cup that leaves your café is a thirty-minute ad walking around the city. Most brands waste it on a logo.
Put something worth reading on it. Or something worth photographing. Assume the cup is going to end up in someone's phone camera — because it is — and design for that frame.
Here are a few great examples of how creative idea can bring some fun,
A case study: Thylacine Coffee (Tasmania)
Thylacine Coffee is one of our client from Tasmania. Their mascot, the Tasmanian tiger, sits well outside the coffee category. The thylacine is endemic to Tasmania, was driven to extinction in the 1930s, and appears on the state's coat of arms.
It carries story before the brand says a word: place, scarcity, a bit of myth. Bean iconography can't carry any of that.
A mascot this loaded also gives the rest of the brand permission. A coffee brand built around a long-extinct Tasmanian marsupial has license to be quieter, more story-led, slower. That permission carries through everything else: tone of voice, packaging, the pace of the website, the way the brand shows up on social.
Thylacine Coffee started with just three blends: strong, mild, and light. Three products don’t give you much to hide behind. Just three variations of the same thing is the risk that they all collapse into one.
What could have easily become three tiles on a grid needed to become something else entirely. Not a catalogue, a story.
We designed the website as a scrollytelling experience.
The narrative unfolds as you move through it. The three blends are not introduced as options. They’re given their own moments. Each one lives in its own scene, with its own atmosphere and pacing. The user moves through them — from strong to mild to light — not as a choice between products, but as a sequence to experience.
The brand already had their loyal customers who consistently chose their coffee.
So alongside a classic one-time store for first-time customers, we introduced a subscription model designed as the long-term relationship. It shifts the role of the brand: from something you occasionally buy, to something that quietly becomes part of your routine.
Both models exist side by side, without competing. One captures intent. The other builds habit.
The site has won a number of awards, but more importantly, it does what it needs to do. When someone lands on the homepage, they don’t need to analyse it or read through layers of explanation. By the time they’ve scrolled once, they understand what Thylacine is. Not because it was explained to them, but because they experienced it.
Check out our work www.thylacinecoffee.com.au
Coffee is one of the most visually refined industries and one of the most repetitive. The opportunity is not to design another “premium-looking” coffee brand. It is to build something that cannot be confused with anything else. Because in a market where everything looks right, looking right is no longer enough.
Every coffee project we've taken on started as "we need to redesign our website". It rarely ends there. Website redesigns turn into full rebrands. And it’s not a coffee industry thing, it’s just how we work.
A coffee brand's job isn't to look good on a cup, but to be remembered when someone walking past three cafés on the same block.
