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Brew a Bold Interest in Your Roasts with Custom Coffee Labels

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You have quality beans roasted to perfection. So why, after doing all that work to prepare the coffee, would you slap any old label on it?

You wouldn’t. But it can be hard to come up with ideas for custom coffee labels that highlight the perfection going on within your bags or bottles. You’ll need to…

Use a label to distinguish your brand and develop its identity
Highlight the flavor and personality of the coffee within
Appeal to coffee buyers who are seeing your label for the first time.

There’s only one question remaining: what’s the best way to do it? You design a custom coffee label that jumps off the shelves and into the customer’s basket! Here’s how.

Tip #1: Tell Your Story

Remember being a kid and reading the back of a cereal box? You can have just as much fun with your custom coffee labels. Often, new coffee roasters put their name and logo on the front of a bag and then stop there. That’s a missed opportunity.

Use that empty space to tell the story of your coffee. Use an icon or flag to highlight its country of origin. Is your coffee fair trade certified? If so, make sure you display that prominently. Try adding illustrations to describe your roasting methods. Think of a custom coffee as a chance to introduce your brand. Imagine your customer asked: “Why should I choose this over Folgers or Maxwell House?”

Tip #2: Choose Your Brand Personality

Your brand “personality,” or your unique selling point, will inform every decision you make about your label. So choose wisely. Above, you’ll see Califia’s Cold Brew Coffee. They use an art-deco-inspired design with ornate lines, illustrations, and thick serif fonts to invoke a premium vibe. Before designing your custom coffee labels, ask yourself that ever-important question: what’s our vibe?

Tip #3: Consider Your Choices

Once you know your personality, it’s time to match design elements to your brand. Consider your choices here:

Colors: Match your label to your brand colors, but be mindful of industry trends. For example, a black bag of coffee is shorthand for “premium roast.” It lends an air of professionalism and provides contrast to illustrations and text. That said, you might want to go with more eye-catching colors that are distinct from the big brands such as Folger’s red, Maxwell House blue, or even Green Mountain.

Font: Cursive, to suggest old-fashioned and classic? Modern high-impact, to suggest innovation and quality? You might turn to craft beer labels for inspiration as many of them feature unusual designs or fonts that push the envelope for what’s “normal” in their space.

Style: How much white space do you have? Does your label fully utilize the space like Califia’s ornate designs? Or perhaps you’re more modern and minimalist, using a simple stencil with your name and logo.

Tip #4: Emphasize Contrast

You won’t develop a brand identity if you make the same choices everyone else is making.

Once you know what makes your coffee different, you should incorporate design elements that emphasize this contrast. For example, let’s say you source all of your coffee from Jamaica. Island and tropical design elements are clear choices here—but also embrace the bold, summer colors that remind us of the Caribbean.

Use color choices that contrast with the browns and whites of so many popular coffee labels. If you are bottling your coffee, you might opt for a transparent label and use the color of the coffee to contrast your font.

Tip #5: Create a Memorable Icon

Everyone recognizes the mythical Starbucks logo. Why? It’s specific. It should be the same for your coffee label. Choose a specific logo for your brand. It doesn’t need to be a mascot, but it should be some graphic element that makes your bag stand out on the crowded store shelves. If a customer wanders down the coffee aisle and sees a wall of black bags with white fonts, they’re going to focus on the one with the most eye-catching logo.

Tip #6: Choose a Unique Shape

Make your coffee labels your canvas. Be willing to play with them. Reconsider the basic square label and look at the whole range of shapes and sizes —oval, oblong, die-cut, off-center—and see if there’s one that strikes you as standing out from the crowd and representing your brand.

Tip #7: Think About the Customer

You can have the finest, tastiest blend around but if your label doesn’t relay the feeling of your coffee, you won’t make the sale. When developing a brand and label for your coffee, you need to ask yourself what niche you’re filling and who you are marketing to.

Roughly two-thirds of all Americans drink coffee on a daily basis; to succeed in such a competitive and established market, you need to identify and target a subgroup that isn’t being served in terms of either flavor or brand vibe. Who is your target audience and what kind of branding are they most likely to engage with? If you can confidently answer that, you can design a label that will make your audience say “this is the coffee for me.”

Once you have a design in mind, make sure your chosen canvas is of the highest quality by choosing custom coffee labels from Stomp. Our user-friendly design tool makes it easy to size and format your art. Once your order is in, we’ll send you a darn-near instant proof so you can focus on roasting and brewing the best coffee around.