Brunch, Brews & Good vibes.^TM

Leaf had 12 cafés when I started. Every one of them looked slightly different — not badly, just slightly, which is worse. “It looks like a flower shop.” — GM, Leaf Café & Co He wasn’t wrong. The identity had aged out of looking like a franchise and settled into looking like one nice little independent, repeated 20 times. That’s a lovely problem for a single café and an expensive one for a group: harder to sell a franchise to a new operator, harder to hold price against the chains, harder to walk into a new state and look like you belong there. They needed one warm, repeatable identity their franchisees could actually run, day to day. Twelve stores have opened since.

Built a kit around the existing logo as requested by the client: flexible assets, signage templates, cup and bag artwork, and seasonal promo layouts that could keep up with menu launches. The useful part wasn’t the design. I sat in the small team at Head Office with the Founder, GM and Operations — which meant designing for the person making the coffee as much as the person buying it. Franchisees don’t read brand guidelines. They open the folder, find the file, and print it. The system had to survive that.

A warmer, more repeatable identity that rolled out across every store and mostly stayed put, which is the real test. Franchisees used it because it was easier than not using it.