Kindling Coffee Co.
A retail rebrand that opened four new cities.
Kindling was a beloved single-location roaster about to bet the company on four out-of-state openings in a single year. Their existing identity was a hand-drawn campfire that didn't scale, didn't translate, and didn't differentiate them from every other indie coffee brand on the West Coast.
We built Kindling a system, not a logo. A modular identity that could speak quietly in a 600 sq ft kiosk in Austin and loudly across a 4,000 sq ft flagship in Brooklyn. Same alphabet, different volume. We treated the brand like a city transit system: legible from a moving car, recognizable from a phone, kinder up close.
We retired the campfire mark and replaced it with a typographic system anchored by a single proprietary letterform — a ligature of K and C that doubles as a flame when set in motion. The system could be a wordmark, a wayfinding tile, a packaging stripe, or a 30-foot neon. One alphabet, infinite voices.
We choreographed the first thirty seconds of every new shop down to the second: where the menu sits, how the counter angles toward the door, which scent hits first, which shelf the seasonal product lives on. Average time-to-first-order dropped from 4:10 to 2:30 across new stores in the first month.
In each new market we ran a campaign called 'Built with ___' — the blank filled in with a local maker, baker, or musician we partnered with for the opening. Each campaign was photographed, printed, and pasted citywide. The campaign was about the city. The brand was the wallpaper. Footfall in opening week beat the original Portland store by 2.4×.
We packaged the brand into a 220-page operations kit + a Figma library so any future store could open without our team in the room. Two of the four 2024 openings were executed entirely by local GMs using the kit — on time, on brand, and on budget.
- 01Identity system + proprietary ligature
- 02Wayfinding system & store signage
- 03Packaging (10 SKUs · retail + wholesale)
- 04Interior design language + materials kit
- 05Launch campaign system (per-city template)
- 06220-page operations brand kit
- Weeks 01–03Strategy, store visits, customer interviews
- Weeks 03–07Identity system + spatial language
- Weeks 06–10Packaging production + signage manufacturing
- Weeks 08–12Per-city campaign production + openings
"We came in with a logo problem. We left with a company we could scale. They built us a brand that hires its own contractors."
