How Northcrest Coffee grew wholesale accounts by 40%

Northcrest Coffee is a specialty roaster based in Portland, Oregon. They'd been roasting for seven years, had a loyal retail following, and an excellent product. What they didn't have was a brand that matched the quality of the coffee.

The problem

Their visual identity had been designed by a friend-of-a-friend in 2017 and had aged poorly. The packaging looked like every other third-wave brand — kraft paper, sans-serif type, a vague circular emblem that could have belonged to any roaster in the country. When buyers from hotels and restaurants visited the website, nothing communicated why Northcrest was worth paying a premium for.

The team knew this. They'd been talking about a rebrand for two years. What stopped them was scope paralysis — they didn't know where to start, and every agency they'd spoken to had proposed a project that felt larger and more expensive than the problem warranted.

Our approach

We proposed a six-week brand sprint. The brief was tight: identity system, packaging direction, and a voice guide — nothing more. We started with two workshops to understand what made Northcrest genuinely different (a direct relationship with three farms in Ethiopia and Guatemala, and a roasting philosophy that prioritised the farmer's intended cup profile over market trends) and built the brand around that.

The visual direction leaned into the provenance story: origin maps, harvest photography, and typography that felt like a well-designed book rather than a café menu board.

The outcome

Twelve weeks after launch (including production time for new packaging), Northcrest saw a 40% increase in wholesale enquiries. The CEO attributed this directly to the new packaging: buyers were reaching out after seeing the product at a wholesale trade show where it had previously gone unnoticed.

Retail conversion from the website improved by 22%. The team has since expanded the identity system to their new café fit-out, reusing assets from the sprint rather than commissioning new work.

"We'd been talking about this rebrand for two years. Demo Studio made it feel manageable and then made it feel essential. The sprint format meant we weren't in endless review cycles — we were making decisions and moving." — Kieran Tully, Co-founder, Northcrest Coffee