FDBusiness.com

Pearlfisher has created a new look for Blue Bottle Coffee’s New Orleans Iced Coffee. Though
many iced coffee brands already crowd the shelves, Blue Bottle’s offering is unique. One of the
country’s leading artisan roasters, Blue Bottle boasts eight cafés in and around the San
Francisco area, six cafes in New York City and is served in farmers markets and restaurants
nationwide. Now bringing their coffee expertise out of their cafes, Blue Bottle’s New Orleans Iced
Coffee is cold brewed for 18 hours with organic roasted chicory, sweetened with organic cane
sugar and cut with organic whole milk. The challenge for the brand was how to share this unique
offer and extend the intimate Blue Bottle experience from carefully curated cafes to a carton,
reaching a larger audience and standing out on shelves in mass retailers.
To help Blue Bottle surmount this challenge, Pearlfisher created a new design for the brand that
stays true to the heart of Blue Bottle Coffee and the Founder, James Freeman’s original vision, at
once challenging coffee category cues while remaining modest and utilitarian. The carton cues
dairy and evokes nostalgia, helping Blue Bottle’s offer stand apart from competitors.
Hamish Campbell, Creative Director at Pearlfisher New York says, “Blue Bottle has always
approached coffee differently than their competitors and it was really important that we applied
that same thinking to their RTD. We were able to elevate Blue Bottle’s current equities by
clarifying their word mark to increase its stature, simplifying messaging on pack and playing up
the Blue Bottle blue in unexpected ways, like the saturated gable, which is incredibly impactful on
shelf.”
Tess Wicksteed, Executive Vice President at Pearlfisher commented, “The challenge when
working with a very simple and pure iconic brand is how to introduce a secondary visual
language with depth that doesn’t complicate the purity of the existing design. Structure is one
way to do this. The milk carton allowed us to play up the brand’s iconic equities without losing
the crafted feel of the brand.”
Look for Blue Bottle’s New Orleans Iced Coffee in Blue Bottle Cafes and retailers nationwide
Spring 2014.