Avatar Coffee Roasters has an expert team with decades of diverse experience. They cultivate meaningful relationships through open-minded communities that care about ethical value systems. Together, we took several deep dives to uncover the core issue just in time to fix their lagging sales.
RESULTS
1,000+
Items sold during 14-hour grand opening
Items sold during 14-hour grand opening
DISTINCTION
Best of the Year Awards 2022, Winner, GDUSA
Packaging 10, Honorable Mention, Graphis Inc.
Packaging 10, Honorable Mention, Graphis Inc.
These customer-driven solutions create open communication between people and their brand. They're guided by purpose and meet at the ground level to grow a trusted brand together. Positively transformational.
Avatar Coffee Roasters is growing. With national expansion in mind they decided to tackle sales. After several deep dives we uncovered a core issue—poor sales were merely the result of a confused brand. They commoditized by pedaling coffee like salespeople which brewed distrust. So, Playstead created a unified visual and verbal identity to help reconnect customers.
We set a goal to attract, communicate with, and inspire potential customers. Building a narrative that encouraged authentic and consistent communication became essential.
Now, Avatar Coffee's answer is creating new rituals and renewing others. After all, rituals thrive on connectivity. It’s supports a value chain that deepens peoples’ relationships with their brand. And it shifts from functional to near spiritual levels of brand worship for them. And it strengthens bonds even during a period of historically weak human connections.
Research | Brand audit from stakeholders and publicly available including business materials, design collateral, and verbal-visual identity elements.
Synthesis | Using a well-known figure to embody the brand's principles anchors brand development.
Ideation | Reviewing Avatar Coffee's current logo against a contextually rich concept spectrum.
Playstead created a more harmonious symbol.
Indian heritage informed the design decisions. What a history! Millenia of ancient traditions, rituals, and temple architecture to British colonizers and finally their independence and search for a national identity. It turns out it was modernism!
The sun rays use glyphs from the typeface, which helps bring it and the text together. It’s bolder—clear—with improved visual weight to it. We used negative shapes to simplify the radiating triangles but maintained 108 in total—2 positive forms of 36 triangles and one negative form of 36. Unlike their first logo, it’s an actual circle with fewer visual elements, so we can focus on its entirety and then pick it apart for understanding.
Just as factors of 108 are sacred, others like 7 and 12 consistently carry meaning. Avatar expresses this through the 19 rays revolving around its symbol. Playstead imbued the mark with this and the following in mind tying into ancient narratives to improve its strength, meaning, and longevity. There’s a lot there!
Surya, symbolizing the sun, represents perception and knowledge. It’s common to divide Surya’s chariot wheel into 12 sections representing time past through months of the year. Seven horses draw the chariot. The total equals 19, a sacred number that we frequently encounter. The seven directions of space, or the septenary, also represent the passage of time. The sum of heaven and earth is expressed through the number seven and is sacred to most religions. The number 12 represents boundless possibilities or infinite realities. Again, 19.
Finally, seven corresponds to esoteric Hinduism and the planes of human consciousness: sensation, emotion, reflective intelligence, intuition, spirituality, will, and divine intimations, which comprise experiential qualities of Avatar Coffee Roasters.
Other symbols include Navagraha, or nine planets, influencing a person’s destiny. When placed on an altar Surya resides at the center. The center is mystical, too, where an individual’s journey represents divine revelation. The 108 triangles radiating from the center of Avatar’s logomark relate to Hindu doctrines about a central deity; the concentric circles relate to the 12-month cycle of labor upon the land. And the circle and triangle derive from their cosmic symbolism, the heavens (the circles) and fire (the triangles). Appropriate, considering roasting transforms beans and releases their potential, which ultimately supports Avatar’s revelations of the sublime for its customers. A last note about the type choice—it’s expressive and decidedly not neutral. It’s lowercase, in this case, as a nod to freedom. Title Case is a western design that’s muddied with class structures. For instance, the ruling class commonly capitalizes White, whereas black was not—Queen instead of peasant. India fought to regain their independence and identity. This gesture acknowledges that.
