CLIENT //
Velvet Sunrise Coffee, Crosscut Coffee
INDUSTRY //
Retail Coffee Roasters
OBJECTIVE //
Velvet Sunrise, a wholesale coffee company, is now seeking to develop its own retail brand under a new name—Crosscut Coffee. The brand should focus on an image that could become synonymous with the coffee and be adaptable for use on marketing, packaging and eventually retail signage.
UNDERSTANDING THE AUDIENCE
To craft a brand that engages a target audience it’s vital to understand that audience first. I use industry research, competitor analysis and insights from customer data to fuel each brand strategy – which begins with the areas below.
MISSION
We turn coffee drinkers into coffee enthusiasts by demonstrating the dramatic difference the freshly roasted coffee brings to taste.
TARGET MARKET
Craft coffee drinkers in the Toronto region.
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
High skilled roasting with high quality beans come together to deliver a high end coffee experience.
BRAND POSITIONING & STRATEGY
Crosscut Coffee’s brand values set the tone for the visual brand and for the customer’s brand experience. They were developed to reflect the target market’s values and desire to experience the superior taste of coffee that has been freshly roasted.
AREAS OF FOCUS
SIGNATURE FLAVORS
Signature espresso and drip coffee blends
SINGLE ORIGIN
A variety of single origin coffees sourced from across the globe
SEASONAL
Special, limited edition blends released seasonally
BRAND VALUES
FRESH
We seek to provide our customers with coffee as fresh as possible.
DIVERSE
We offer our customers a wide choice of quality roasts, beans and flavours.
AMBITIOUS
We seek to turn our local area into a region of coffee enthusiasts by providing unique, quality coffees that challenge the norm.
DEDICATED
We are coffee fanatics and have a high attention to detail throughout every step of our process.
SUSTAINABLE
We use up-cycled materials because it is important to us to preserve and help the environment.
INSIGHTFUL
We pride ourselves on our knowledge and enthusiasm for our roasts and coffees and share that knowledge with our customers.
SKILLED
We train our team to have the skills necessary to produce the best coffee we can.
EXPERIMENTAL
We continually seek out new beans and flavour profiles to provide high quality and unique tastes.
PASSIONATE
Our ever-growing zeal for coffee inspires us to constantly be learning, sharing and experimenting.
THE LOGO
HISTORY & LOCATION
With this logo concept, we used the location of Stouffville, Ontario as the inspiration and focused on its history of sawmills.
We began with imagery inspired by the name Crosscut—hand saws, wood and circular saws and focused on the themes of high-quality, hand-crafted and artisanal skills. The aim was to create a strong identity that any toughened sawmill worker of the 1800s would be proud of.
Strong, distressed lettering family is clean and modern, making it easy to see and read at a wide range of sizes, while the rustic distressing and styling of the type family gently nods to type used by hardworking industries of bygone times.
Historic crosscut saw and typeface give a rustic, nostalgic feel while giving a nod to the prevalence of sawmills in Stouffville around time of its establishment in the 1800s.
COLOR PALETTE
Crosscut Coffee’s Color Palette was developed in warm, rich tones inspired by the roasting levels of coffee beans and the rugged Canadian frontier.
Crosscut Coffee’s artfully crafted coffee blends are original, unique and complex, just like the wood grain of lumber. We used this as inspiration for wood grain patterns and lumberjack style fabric patterns.
COFFEE BRAND PACKAGING
The Crosscut Coffee brand comes to life on the range of coffee packaging and merchandise designs. The color palette can also be used to provide informational clues to customers, such as size of coffee cups or roast style.