Central City Coffee needed branding that stood out on competitive store shelves and embodied their mission: empowering women to achieve self-sufficiency for themselves and their families.
Business Director at Central City Coffee
Central City Coffee works to end homelessness and help women through career training.
The Central City Coffee crew is made up of mothers who are moving from homelessness to self-sufficiency. These amazing women do everything from roasting coffee to office administration to coffee delivery to bookkeeping! While getting this on-the-job experience, they also work with Central City to complete career training and receive job search support.
Brand Strategist
The collaborative naming approach meant that we were able to work very closely with Central City’s representatives, including women who’d been through the program, to find the most resonant names for these characters. And the workshops were a lot of fun!
Senior Designer
“Conceptually, the strategists at Murmur came up with such great names that half the work was done! We pulled inspiration from fashion blog posts and superhero attire to get the look and feel for each of the heroines.”
We needed to find a brand concept that would resonate with coffee consumers and the women working in the Central City program. It needed to stand out as unique among coffee brands and be both inspiring and strong, a point for many to rally around. We decided to focus on women and, specifically, women’s empowerment and began working with female archetypes to create characters that represented different variations on this theme. Each character is meant to spark the imagination with a touch of magic.
The final and most crucial part of the project was the packaging design. We wanted to create truly stand-out work to draw eyes to this coffee on store shelves. Our inspired designers created striking illustration for each character, working tirelessly to perfect every detail. They chose bright, engaging color palettes so the bags can really shine on shelves in a sea of browns, greys, and similarly muted coffee colors. These designs visually embody the bright, crucial, and hope-filled work that Central City does in our community.
Once we’d settled on the character concept and naming direction, we created a two word alliterative naming convention and organized a workshop with a group from Central City and our Murmur naming team to come up with ideas. This collaboration resulted in a list of great ideas that we kept honing until we found just the right name for each coffee.
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