Marrow Roasters

Specialty coffee has a house style and Marrow was tired of it. Not the taste — the look. Every bag on the shelf was doing the same thing: an illustration of a mountain, a paragraph about a farm, four tasting notes in a row.

The economics were the brief

Marrow rotates thirty-odd lots a year. Under the old system each one needed its own printed bag, which meant minimum orders, which meant a cupboard full of packaging for coffee that had already sold out. The design problem was actually an inventory problem.

So the bag stopped carrying the coffee's identity. One kraft bag, one die-cut mark, printed once in volume. The lot lives on a single applied label: a number, an origin, a date. The system's variety comes from the labels, which cost almost nothing and can be printed the morning a lot lands.

A mark that survives a die

The mark had to work as a physical hole in a bag, which rules out most of what a mark can be. No fine lines, no counters under 3mm, no dependence on colour. What survived is a shape you can cut, emboss, stencil onto a window or stamp on a cup — which turned out to be the whole signage system too.

We designed the cheapest version first. Everything good about the system came out of that constraint rather than in spite of it.

In the shop

The same shape scaled up to the shop front, cut once out of steel. It is the only piece of the identity that cost real money, and it is the only piece that needed to.