Audit the experience
We looked at product, service, space, consistency and customer perception before touching the identity.
Hospitality · Brand System
The Pelican
Turning a good neighborhood café into a brand designed to grow without losing its warmth.
- Scope
- Strategy · Identity · Packaging · Digital · Guest Experience
- Industry
- Specialty Coffee · Hospitality
- Relationship
- Ongoing brand partnership
01 · Starting point
The café was already good.
The brand had to catch up.
The first strategic work started with the actual experience, not a moodboard. The Pelican already had strong fundamentals: good coffee and food, capable baristas, service people liked and a cozy atmosphere. At the same time, the experience was not always consistent and the business felt more like a modern coffee place than a clearly ownable specialty-coffee brand.
The ambition was much larger than one shop: a recognizable coffee brand that could eventually support more cafés, its own roasting and a wider retail world. Our job was to separate what needed to evolve from what should never be lost.
Strategic centerSpecialty quality.
Specialty quality.
Without specialty distance.
The brand character was deliberately warm, friendly, knowledgeable and unpretentious. Expertise should be felt in the product and service, not performed as exclusivity. That gave us a simple filter for every later design decision: make it better, clearer and more recognizable, but never colder.
How the system grew
One character.
Many real situations.
Define the character
Warm, informed, modern and down-to-earth became more useful than a list of abstract brand adjectives.
Build the identity
The mark, typography, layouts and material feeling were designed as a repeatable system rather than a one-off logo.
Extend the relationship
Packaging, cups, digital loyalty and other guest touchpoints let the same brand live before, during and after the café visit.
Packaging
Different coffees.
One recognizable shelf.
The retail system had two jobs at once: give individual coffees enough room to feel different and make the range unmistakably Pelican from a distance. The architecture was therefore designed as a family, not as a collection of unrelated labels.
From the counter
to the guest's phone.
The loyalty system extends the same relationship logic into a digital touchpoint. Guests scan their personal QR card, every purchased drink adds 100 points, rewards stay transparent, and the next visit feels like a continuation rather than another transaction.
The phone below is an accurate static portfolio representation of the live customer experience and does not connect to the loyalty backend.
The PelicanCard
GOOD TO SEE YOU AGAIN.
Magnus
PEL-8K4Q2
Scan at the Pelican kiosk. Every purchased drink earns you 100 points.
YOUR POINTS600
Next rewardCoffee1,000 pts
Rewards
Coffee1,000 pts
Coffee + pastry2,000 pts
Coffee + tart2,500 pts
Pelican Tote Bag3,000 pts
Coffee beans for home4,000 pts
Pelican T-Shirt6,000 pts
Selected applications
The images are an excerpt.
The project is the system.
The broader work spans brand strategy, identity, packaging, cups and service touchpoints, menus and communication, digital experiences, loyalty and ongoing physical brand development. What is shown here is intentionally only a selection.