Mercy Mercy Mercy

A paired back identity comprised of strong typography (shout-out to the typeface Trivia Gothic for its wonderful egg-like ampersand) and a direct tone of voice with a scrappy and playful illustration style that invokes that feeling of not quite being all there before the morning brew.

A uniquely small budget gave us the challenge of bootstrapping as much of the project as possible using ready-mades and recycled materials wherever we could.

The timber used for shelving, cabinets, and furniture is all beautiful Douglas fir salvaged from the previous tenants shop fit. We made wood-terrazzo table tops using the waste material from some circular tree tables made for a previous project – luckily nobody had the heart to throw them away at the time. The tap handles were even samples from a supplier of industrial machine parts.

Here's the issue. Somewhere around 70% – 80% of drink sales in a coffee shop are milk based drinks. Between dairy and alternatives (soy, oat etc.) this demand creates a huge amount of plastic waste in the form of packaging and increased energy use for refrigerated storage.

To solve this, we worked with suppliers and another local coffee shop (shout out to New Cut Coffee) to build a milk-on-tap system with reusable kegs for both dairy and oat milk, entirely removing plastic from the supply chain.

The added benefit of this set-up means we can utilise the kitchen's walk-in fridge meaning more efficient energy use and more compact storage. Combined with a fancy nitrogen recuperator, we can operate the taps using nitrogen taken from the air, so there's no need for heavy gas cylinders to be transported. 

There's a small trade off with a slightly increased unit cost per drink, but in our opinion it's an excellent alternative to the vast amounts of plastic and energy waste. Besides, all good ideas have to start somewhere right?