Seattle’s Best Coffee

The brand transformation of Seattle’s Best Coffee

A blank sheet of paper. That’s what Howard Schultz presented to his team as the vision for Seattle’s Best Coffee. And this was the brief that the president, Michelle Gass and her team brought to us. It was a simple challenge to reimagine a brand and a business. There were to be no wrong answers and no preconceived notions. Only expectations to do something great and meaningful with a brand called Seattle’s Best Coffee.

THE CONTEXT— Seattle’s Best was a neglected company. Withering sales, generic image, irrelevance. The only way to get them out of their decade long slump was a total brand reinvention, which challenged how the entire industry and culture thought about coffee.

THE SOLUTION— Together, we saw a gap between premium, complex coffee products and cheap, low-brow coffee products. On top of that, American culture viewed coffee only as utilitarian, serious and masculine. We defined the upscale middle ground as a blend of premium and mass appeal and replaced complex geographical identifiers with fun, easy-to-understand numerical and color coded system. The very first coffee brand to apply this system that’s commonly adapted today. To do this, we had to massively transform the corporate culture, business model, products, retail presence, image and messaging of Seattle's Best Coffee.