A coffee brand that reads from across the room

Kgosi arrived asking for a new logo. Two hours into the first conversation it was clear the mark was doing fine and the range was the problem. Six coffees had been designed one at a time over three years, each with its own type, its own illustration and its own idea of what a coffee bag should be. On a counter that reads as variety. On a shelf next to eleven competitors it reads as eleven more competitors.

So the brief changed before anything was drawn. Not a new identity, a system: one architecture that could hold six coffees now and sixteen later without anybody having to invent a new bag.

Everything on the pack is fixed except one block of colour, which carries the roast. Light, medium and dark are three tones of the same warm neutral, so the range reads as one family from across the room and the individual coffee resolves as you walk towards it. The origin, the farm and the tasting notes sit in a fixed panel that never moves between products, which means a customer who has bought once knows exactly where to look the second time.

The wholesale line drops the colour block entirely and prints one ink on unbleached kraft. It is the same system with the volume turned down, and it costs less than half of what the retail bag costs to produce.

We built the online store after the packaging rather than alongside it, so the product photography could be shot once against the finished bags and used in both places. The site carries six products, a subscription, and nothing else. There is no blog, because Kgosi does not have anyone to write one, and an empty blog is worse than no blog.