For the last year or more we have been trying to work towards a shift in the way the world views and feels towards our product. We obviously like our company and think that our previous logo’s and labels and website were great. But we also knew it could be better. One of the slogan’s I use when talking about our values as a company is “a company as good as our coffee”. Our coffee has been awesome for awhile now, but we knew it was by far the strongest component of our company. We wanted a brand that represented our company and communicated our values.
For me, the pinnacle of our brand is our bags of coffee. But we had to start at the beginning. Finding the right designer for one’s company feels, to me like finding the right spouse. We tried a few until we circled back to The Sherwood Press who we have worked with us before on our business cards. I thought of the Sherwood Press as well more of a Letter Press business even though Jami the one lady press designs business cards and wedding invitations etc. Jami and I spent months working on a logo. We began by building the structure through fonts primarily. I spent weeks searching font websites for inspiration. I wanted a logo that was full of energy, something elegant, approachable and felt comfortable in the Northwest. At one point when we had hit a wall where the line was in the sand that we just might not find anything for Olympia Coffee that felt like Olympia Coffee. At this time I brought back in the topic of using the dreaded trendy and bulky Rosewood font. Jami is not a fan of this font, and I was hoping to get away from it as well, but it does just carry the history of our company together. Once we returned to Rosewood things moved along quicker, stacked text looked great but just didn’t look like a logo yet. When we added “blue ribbon” shape around the logo I knew we were on the right track.
We returned to a theme I wanted to represent in our brand from the start. The Sun. Bringing light, a new dawn, waking us up, filling us with warmth, refreshing, comforting, the first thing we see in the morning. It felt so perfect for what we want Olympia Coffee to be and how we and our customers view us. In so many ways it felt like a path of self discovery.
Once we settled on the logo, the idea of packaging came up immediately. I knew we had to do something “big”. I wanted to reconstruct the idea of coffee packaging. We really started at the beginning, looking at every which way coffee could be held. In the end the bag felt right it made sense and is comforting and familiar. We wanted the new label to be cleaner, and have a stronger presence of the Olympia Coffee Roasting Co Brand. The origin information we are so obsessed with could not go away either we just needed a clever way to tell that story. In the end we created a letter pressed card that is perforated up top and glued on. When you flip the card up, you read the longer description and “story” behind the coffee. We also wanted a section for your own personal notes on the coffee. To our knowledge nobody has ever done this before. We imagine our labels to know be collectable and treasured similar to baseball cards or love letters.I hope you love the new look too.
