Fellow revamped Hermanos Colombian Coffee Roasters’ packaging design as the brand expanded across London from its beginnings at Victoria Station. Their goal was to redefine their identity, maintaining their Colombian coffee shop ambiance and emphasizing their founders’ narrative of knowledge, passion, and quality.
The design introduced a vibrant color scheme and bilingual typography to convey cultural heritage and incorporated legacy assets like a refined pictogram for consistency. Collaborating closely with Hermanos, they created various packaging solutions and brand collateral to demonstrate the brand’s adaptability.
Since their debut at Victoria Station, Hermanos Colombian Coffee Roasters have continually flourished, extending their presence across London with new establishments. The Hermanos team partnered with Fellow, seeking to redefine their brand identity and position themselves as a premier choice for coffee enthusiasts. Maintaining pivotal elements of their existing brand — including the lively atmosphere and relaxed Colombian coffee shop ambiance — was crucial. Simultaneously, they aimed to amplify their founders’ compelling narrative, thereby sharing the cherished attributes of knowledge, passion, and quality that their dedicated consumers have grown to adore.
By conducting a competitor audit and analysing the existing brand, we identified a distinct opportunity for Hermanos to differentiate itself in a crowded market. While most competitors project a sense of ‘premium’ through a sleek, modern approach in terms of appearance and atmosphere, Fellow devised a brand narrative that communicated this sense of ‘premium’ through the lens of value. This approach preserves the brand’s authenticity, aligning with its origins and reflecting its distinct cultural essence. Allowing the brand to share its personality and distinctive characteristics that set it apart, mirroring the uniqueness found in its coffee.
Exploration
The brand needed to encompass vibrancy, drawing inspiration from the natural landscape and subcultures of surrounding regions and cities. We created a colour palette and typographic style that echoed the energy of these locales, borrowing bold fonts akin to those used in street art and the pigments adorning shopfronts. In terms of typography, we adopted a bilingual approach, incorporating both sans-serif and serif fonts. The brand primarily employs Spanish—Colombia’s dominant language—enabling Hermanos to authentically convey their heritage and personality through communication supported with English translations. During the conceptual phase of the project, we integrated legacy assets from the existing brand, including a pictogram. This pictogram served as a visual representation of the brand, featuring the founders in vector form. We reimagined and refined this pictogram as a hallmark of quality, to be consistently employed across the brand alongside the primary logotype.
Development
Hermanos lacked a design system that could facilitate their growth. Nothing was in place to distinctly identify or differentiate their single-origin coffees for consumers. To address this, we established a cohesive design system of graphic shapes and colours. These shapes represented significant landmarks within Colombia’s landscape—Temples, Valleys, Favelas—and were depicted on a square grid reminiscent of traditional Colombian weave patterns. Each shape was then associated with a specific region of Colombia, allowing the coffees to be referenced by location and distinguished through unique colour combinations.
Implementation
Collaborating closely with the Hermanos team, Fellow proceeded to nurture creativity by crafting an extensive array of packaging choices and brand collateral. This encompassed everything from coffee labels to bundles and taster kits. This endeavour served as a remarkable opportunity to unveil the full scope of the brand and packaging system, while also demonstrating the versatility of the brand’s visual identity. The Hermanos brand was unveiled at the London Coffee Festival, resulting in a resonating success with the intended audience.
