Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Santo Caffeina!

Holy Caffeine!  I'm so excited right now!  Last week, we proudly rolled out our own line of artisan coffee!  As a small business owner, a challenge over time is to keep things fresh and exciting.  It's often easier for me to think of chocolate innovation, but this time the opportunity came to our hip little lounge.  Through a serendipitous convergence of business relationships and family connections, Mountain Goat coffee came calling.

A subsidiary company of a local restaurant chain, Mountain Goat Coffee is the real deal.  When these guys decided roasting their own coffee would yield better profitability as well as quality for their restaurants, they became coffee experts.  They traveled, studied and practiced.  And our paths crossed!

After three cuppings (intense coffee tastings) with customers, family and staff--we felt like we were onto something amazing!  Tasty, nuanced and smooth, the feedback was fantastic and the buzz began!  In addition to joining forces with such creative coffee artisans, we also got a chance to develop and visually brand a new addition to the Cocoa Dolce family of products.  Since we are blessed with so many creative and talented staffers, I gave much of the branding decision to my right AND left-hand adviser's, Angie and Amber.  In collaboration with our dream designer, Paul Fountain.

So how did we do?  Coffee has been roasted, packaged and consumed since almost the beginning of time.  It's hard to reinvent any aspect of coffee...but let's see how we did?? How about this for a label design??



The Cocoa Dolce Think Tank came up with the tag line:  Shattering Expectations!  And look at the cup!  Paul came up with this idea to carefully break one of our coffee mugs and then show the coffee bursting out of the cup.  Genius!  

And the rest is the beginning of history.  Sales are great, customers are happy and we have these really cool new products to talk about.  So if you see any of us, ask us about our coffee!