Branding for coffee roasters who want their cup to match their craft.
Most coffee brands look like the inventory shelf they're sold from — sticker, pouch, bean dot, weight. We build coffee brand systems that travel: from the roaster floor to the café POS to the DTC subscription, with brand architecture that holds whether you're shipping 50 bags or 50,000.
Why coffee brands all start to look the same.
Your bag looks like every other roaster's.
Same color hierarchy, same single-origin notes layout, same tasting wheel. The brand becomes the bag — and the bag is interchangeable on a café shelf at first glance.
DTC and wholesale ship different brands.
The website looks artisan. The wholesale catalog looks B2B. Cafés serve your bean from a different visual story than the website tells. Three voices, one roaster, no system.
Subscription churn is a brand problem.
Customers leave because nothing about the box makes them feel like they're part of something. The product is great; the experience is generic — and generic doesn't compound.
Built for every place coffee shows up.
A coffee brand system, not a logo refresh — production-ready across roaster, café, wholesale, and DTC.Coffee brand strategy + identity.
Positioning, audience, naming, story — written down once and used everywhere. Identity system covering pouch, bag art, café signage, wholesale catalog, and DTC. Coffee-native, not retail-generic.
Pouch + packaging system.
Heat-shrunk labels, bag weights (12oz / 5lb / 50lb), single-origin variations, blends, seasonals. Roaster-side production-ready, not just a Figma file.
Café + retail signage.
Menu boards, bag display systems, espresso machine wraps, in-café merchandise. Same brand, room-scale, baristas can ship it.
Wholesale catalog + sales kit
A B2B asset that doesn't make your roaster look smaller than it is.
Subscription experience design
Box, insert, ritual. The thing that makes month 6 feel like month 1.
Tasting notes + content system
A way to write single-origin notes that doesn't sound like every other roaster's.
Origin + roastery photography
Visual library covering origin trips, roastery floor, packaging, baristas at work.
DTC site (Shopify Plus)
Storefront, subscription, café finder — built on the brand system, not bolted to it.
Café environmental design
Floor plan moodboard to wayfinding to menu architecture (where applicable).
Four phases, from origin to launch.
Start a Brand BlueprintThe story you're actually telling.
- Founder + roaster interviews
- Customer research (DTC + wholesale + café)
- Origin trip when relevant + photography brief
- Competitive map of the coffee shelf
Brand architecture, coffee-native.
- Positioning, audience, naming + verbal voice
- Tasting-note language system (not a tasting wheel)
- Visual system: typography, color, photography direction
- Roaster identity vs blend identity vs café identity
The full system, across every touchpoint.
- Pouch + bag art (every variant + seasonal)
- Wholesale catalog + sales kit
- Shopify Plus DTC store + subscription experience
- Café signage, menu boards, merch, environmental
Production + launch we manage end-to-end.
- Vendor management (printing, embroidery, signage, install)
- Café rollout: signage install + barista training
- Wholesale relaunch with the new sales kit
- DTC site launch + subscription migration
A specialty roaster that finally looks like it tastes.
A 12-year-old single-origin roaster came to us with a great bean, three different visual identities, and a wholesale program that looked like a stock template. We rebuilt the brand system from the pouch up — across DTC, wholesale, and four café locations — in 12 weeks.
“They rebuilt the whole engine while we kept selling. The brand finally matches what the product has always been.”
Honest fit
When a rebrand makes sense — and when it doesn’t.
Let's talk if
- You're at $1M+ revenue (or about to cross) and the brand is starting to feel like a cap on what comes next.
- You're expanding into cafés, retail, or wholesale — the brand needs to scale to a room, not just a shelf.
- Your coffee is great and the founder can articulate why — we'll do the rest of the translation work.
- DTC, wholesale, and café look like three different brands and the team has stopped trying to reconcile them.
- You've outgrown the freelancer who designed the original pouch and you're not ready to hire in-house creative.
Hold off if
- Pre-product roaster — wait until you have the bean dialed and a real customer signal.
- Looking for just a logo refresh — that's a tactical fix; we build systems.
- DIY-only — coffee branding requires production partners and we don't ship a Figma file and call it done.
- No roaster, retail, or café to pilot the system in — the system needs surfaces to live on.
Three ways in. All of them de-risk the rebrand.
Brand Blueprint
- Coffee-shelf competitive audit
- Brand inventory across DTC + wholesale + café
- Positioning sprint with founder + roaster
- Brand roadmap + financial case
- Goes/no-goes for the full rebrand
Coffee brand system
- Brand strategy + positioning
- Identity system (typography, color, photography direction)
- Pouch + packaging across every weight + variant
- Wholesale catalog + B2B sales kit
- Shopify Plus DTC site + subscription experience
- Café signage, menu boards, environmental design
- Production-vendor management + launch
Brand Support retainer
- Seasonal release artwork (pouches, menu, social)
- New café opening creative + signage
- Wholesale program updates
- Photography sprints (origin, roastery, product)
- Quarterly brand review
Built for the roaster’s shelf.
40+ five-star reviews · Clutch · Shopify · Google“Commence Studio is a smart, thoughtful team. They do a great job of understanding the business and use cases of every project.”
“We felt that the Commence team truly understood what made our brand tick and how we could differentiate our firm.”
“Working with artists like them has been a pleasure — they take their craft as seriously as we do our food.”
“They delivered everything they promised. They were great at understanding what we were trying to communicate and conveyed information in a new way.”
“A team of young professionals delivering high-quality, modern work in a flexible environment. They made it easy to recommend changes as needed.”
“They created something better than what I could have articulated. The graphic art they produce stood out far before I engaged them.”
“They're a cut above other agencies I've seen. I got exactly what I wanted and have recommended them to others.”
“We've gotten really positive feedback — everyone loved it. Branding is like architecture; you shouldn't have to explain it.”
“Communication was clear and concise. Many team members worked together to create a seamless end result.”
Things roasters ask before they sign.
We've got a good logo and decent packaging — do we need a full rebrand?+
Probably not. Most roasters who come to us think they need a rebrand and end up with a brand-system extension instead — taking what’s working and giving it the architecture to scale to wholesale, café, and DTC consistently. That’s why the engagement starts with a $3,500 Blueprint: we audit the existing brand against where you’re actually trying to take the business, then recommend rebrand vs evolve. Both engagements are real outcomes.
How do you actually understand coffee — have you worked with roasters?+
Yes. We’ve worked with single-origin roasters, blend-led brands, café chains expanding wholesale, and roasters expanding into café. We know the difference between a Probat and a Loring, what a 12oz heat-shrunk pouch costs to retool, why most QR-code-on-the-bag implementations don’t get scanned, and why your wholesale buyer cares more about the case-pack diagram than the origin story. Coffee branding is a craft we take seriously.
Will you handle our pouch printing and packaging production?+
We handle vendor selection, spec, and management — not the print run itself. We have working relationships with the pouch printers, label converters, and packaging vendors that growth-stage roasters use, and we ship press-ready files plus a vendor brief that the printer can run from. You’re billed for production directly by the vendor; we don’t mark it up.
We have multiple café locations. Do you do environmental design too?+
Yes — menu boards, signage, espresso machine wraps, in-store merchandise, wayfinding, and where it makes sense, full environmental design from floor-plan moodboard through install. We partner with fabrication shops on physical builds and manage them as part of the engagement.
What about subscription? We use Recharge / Stay AI.+
Both work. The unique opportunity in coffee subscription is the unboxing — most coffee subscriptions ship a generic mailer with a sticker. We design the box, the insert, and the ritual that makes month 6 feel different from month 1. We’ll also rebuild your subscription dashboard if the current one is the default Recharge or Stay AI customer portal.
Can you help with our wholesale program?+
Yes. Wholesale is usually where the brand work pays back fastest because most roasters’ B2B materials look smaller than the brand actually is. We design the catalog, sales kit, order forms, and the café-rep handoff materials. If you’re running on Shopify B2B, we wire the wholesale portal to the same brand system as DTC — buyers get a wholesale-tier experience, not a stripped-down DTC experience.
What's the engagement length?+
10–14 weeks for the brand system. Roasters with multiple café locations or international wholesale on the longer end. Most clients then move into our Brand Support retainer for seasonal releases, new café openings, and ongoing creative.
How do you handle origin trips, if needed?+
We don’t insist on origin trips, but they\’re useful when the brand story leans into farm-direct relationships. When relevant, we travel with you (or with your green buyer) and run the photography + interview brief in-country. Travel is invoiced at cost.
Compete on brand.
30-min call to see if it's a fit. Then a $3,500 Blueprint that audits your brand against the shelf you're trying to win. Most roasters discover the brand work pays back faster than another seasonal release.
