Esselon is an award-winning café and coffee roaster that had outgrown its homegrown
packaging design and was ready for a rebrand capable of taking the company to the next level. “Elegance without being elegant,” was the Esselon team’s request for their new look. We love it when clients challenge us with seemingly contradictory frameworks (and yes, we knew exactly what they meant!)

We drew on the Western Massachusetts landscape to craft a clean and refined look and feel that features the beautiful Seven Sisters mountain range. As a much-loved coffee roastery, Esselon is respected for their Fair Trade practices and commitment to quality. Through this brand refresh, we celebrated Esselon’s local roots and elevated their verbal and visual identity to speak to a national audience.

We reinvented Esselon’s coffee bag with a clean, refined look designed to stand out on-shelf and encourage local grassroots brand growth while driving potential presence in national chains. Clean linework, ample negative space, and appealing flowing horizon lines combine with a suite of graphic elements tied to the local scene, rendering a landscape that captures the brand’s unique ‘terroir.’ The locally iconic café is featured front and center, with an ascending set of stairs creating a warm, welcoming feeling to draw coffee-lovers in. To top it off, an eye-catching suite of colorful labels spotlight the country of Esselon’s single-origin roasts and assures the bag pops on-shelf.

The launch of Esselon’s refreshed brand and new packaging was highly successful, with same store sales increasing by 30-40% on average since the launch. They’ve also been able to bring on new, wholesale retail outlet customers easily and are currently working with two large grocery chains in hopes of getting the bags into all of their locations. The client said that before the redesign, they never would have considered a move like this.  
 
The positive feedback from customers and retailers inspired Esselon to ask for our help in riding the wave of publicity and media coverage, and continuing to build on its brand awareness in regional markets through channels other than retail.
 
In response to this inquiry, we ran a paid social initiative aimed at building brand awareness and consideration among its key audience — coffee lovers in New England (Massachusetts in particular). Through this campaign, Esselon succeeded in generating brand awareness, yielding a 233% bump in followers on Instagram and a 5% increase on Facebook through the 12-week campaign. As a byproduct of the increased buzz — and an affirmation of our initial insight — the brand saw a 352% jump in average post engagement as well as an increase in user generated content during that time. Website traffic also increased 66%, with traffic from social media increasing more than 2,100% compared with the previous 12-week period.