we built coffe enthusiasts a warmer way to grab a cup
a little bird with a big pour
CoffeeBird is a simple promise: one monthly subscription, three drinks a day, at the independent shops you already love. Members pay $29–$49 a month. Eighty-five percent of that goes straight to the merchant. We don't take a cut of their craft — we take 15% for connecting the dots.
It's a three-sided marketplace — coffee drinkers, shop owners, and the operations humming behind both — and we designed every side to live in the same warm, hand-drawn world.
clientCoffeeBird
CategorySubscription Marketplace — Brand / Product / Go-to-Market
ScopeNew venture, built from scratch — concept through launch: brand identity, consumer app, merchant platform, and marketing.
THE CHALLENGEIndependent coffee shops are losing the daily-habit war. The chains have the apps, the loyalty points, and the subscriptions. The shop on the corner has a punch card and a prayer. The brief was to build — from a blank page — a brand and a business that hand independents the same firepower: a daily-coffee subscription people actually want, and a platform that keeps the lights on for the shops that pour it
What made it boldWe weren't handed a product to advertise. We were handed nothing, and built the whole thing — the concept, the name, the brand, three connected products, the pricing model, and the go-to-market. A company, not a campaign.
THE SOLUTION
the idea, in three sips
Most subscription apps are built to extract. CoffeeBird is built to give, and the math is the message. Members get three drinks a day for one flat price. Shops keep 85% of every subscription, paid out automatically every month through Stripe Connect. The business model is the brand promise — fair to the people who actually make the coffee.
meet the bird
Slate-teal feathers, a warm-orange beak, and a hand-drawn personality that shows up everywhere the brand does. We built the whole world around her: cream-paper backgrounds, a signature pistachio-mint surface, charcoal ink for type, and a slate-teal green lifted straight from her feathers. Flat planes of color, barely-there shadows — friendly, not flashy. A heavy editorial display face (Galano Grotesque Alt) does the talking; a clean humanist body (Manrope) does the explaining. The result reads warm and trustworthy to two very different audiences at once — daily coffee drinkers, and the small-business owners betting on us.
subscribe, sip, repeat
The consumer app does three things beautifully. Find your shops on a map. Subscribe to your favorites. Walk in, show a QR code, and walk out with your drink — the whole redemption clears in under three seconds. Sign-up to subscribed takes about ninety: a phone number, a one-time code, a card, done. Built in React Native, iOS first, Android close behind.
self-serve in minutes, paid every month
For shop owners, getting in is almost suspiciously easy. A magic link, a few photos, shop details, a Stripe Connect hookup — then a five-minute human review, and they're live. From there it's a self-serve dashboard: manage subscriptions, scan redemptions, watch the payouts land every month. No POS overhaul. No sales rep. No catch.
Then we said it out loud. A responsive marketing site carries the whole idea to the world: the product promise, a clear how-it-works, the shops worth flocking to, and a straight pitch to merchants on why joining pays. Same bird, same warmth, desktop to mobile.
Show people the bird!
We believe coffee enthusiasts are a special bunch and will be more than enthusiastic of joining the flock. What better way to do that than to grab some CoffeeBird merch?
It’s a grind, but we’re betting on it. CoffeeBird hasn't launched yet — so we won't hand you numbers we don't have. What we'll hand you is everything else: a fully realized brand, three production-ready products, a business model that's fair by design, and infrastructure built to scale. We started with an empty page and a hand-drawn bird. We finished with a company ready to give independent coffee its daily habit back.
The results aren't in yet. I guess you could say, it’s still brewing.
