WORK / FERNHILL ROASTERS
Fernhill Roasters
A new identity and a subscription-first Shopify store for a small-batch roastery in Bristol.
BRAND IDENTITY · PACKAGING · SHOPIFY STORE
OVERVIEW
A two-person roastery with a big goal.
Fernhill roasts small batches of single-origin coffee in a converted dairy in Bristol, and sells it by monthly subscription and through a few local cafés. With around 1,400 subscribers and a plan to reach 5,000 in 18 months, they needed a brand that could do more of the work.
CHALLENGE
Lost on the café shelf.
Their branding was made by a friend in a weekend, and cafés told them they struggled to tell Fernhill apart from three other roasters. A tasting room was opening too, so the brand had to work on a bag, a website and a wall. The founders didn't want another brown kraft bag with a sans-serif logo, but still saw themselves as rustic. The brief was friendly, confident and slightly playful: the best independent bookshop, not a woodland retreat.
APPROACH
The hill, not the fern.
Rather than putting a fern in the logo, I used the hill itself. Contour lines drawn from the hill behind the dairy run across the bags, the website and the tasting room, so the name is felt rather than illustrated.
Each origin gets its own bold colour (yellow for Ethiopia, red for Colombia, blue for Brazil), held together by the same layout, type and deep fern green. A full shelf reads as one family, not a rainbow.
Roast level and tasting notes sit up front in a very legible text face, because that's what Tom, the roaster, cares about most. The Shopify store leads with subscription: a clear promise, three simple steps, and product pages that offer subscribing first.
ONE COLOUR PER ORIGIN, ONE SYSTEM ACROSS THE SHELF
PRODUCT PAGE: SUBSCRIBING COMES FIRST
TASTING NOTES AND ROAST LEVEL, EASY TO READ AT A GLANCE
THREE STEPS TO A SUBSCRIPTION
TOOLS USED
Figma and Shopify
Identity, packaging and the store designed in Figma, with the store planned for Shopify.