“At 9.58%, Shopify reported the store as having the highest conversion rate in the food and drinks sector, whilst placing it in the top 10% for traffic volume for stores opened globally in the same month.”

BE. AR. Coffee

Coffee Pod Packaging Design
BE AR Cafe Branding Design
BE . AR. Hot Drinks Menu

Website Design Services for Subscription Coffee Businesses

BE. AR. Cofee, aka The Bean Around, is a locally owned and operated, coffee-obsessed, family-run business with a Zimbabwean and Sicilian heritage. Gareth, an ideas man through and through, approached us back in 2019 with an exciting branding and design project for a boutique themed coffee house based in Peterborough, UK.

Graphic Design – Restaurants and Cafes

It was a privilege to have worked closely with Gareth and the BE. AR. team to help them create a minimalist brand that would be both bold and distinctive, yet transfer and sit well within their cafes varying themes. We opted for a clean minimalist abbreviation of their full brand name, highly memorable with a simple yet bold display typeface. We settled on the deep foliage green colour of Pantone 553.

Their first cafe was Sicilian themed which included the food and drinks served, and we carefully selected colour accents and imagery throughout to portray their Sicilian heritage. Everything was considered, from the bespoke branded seating barriers through to a huge 3 meter wide mural in the ceiling, and the various supporting literature and styling choices throughout.

The exterior and interior of the cafe was visualised in Photoshop and used as part of the proposal documents to help secure the site with the Local Authority. Once all was happy with the design and layout, we worked on converting the visual assets created into production ready artwork and liaised with the signage and shopfitting companies enlisted to carry out the installation.

Sadly, soon after opening their cafe, Covid hit and the business was forced to close. This clearly accelerated the need to pivot and launch onto eCommerce, to offer subscription coffee, to build out a digital marketing funnel and to begin growing their customer base both locally and at an international level.

Still very much in it’s infancy, BE.AR. Coffee continues to go from strength to strength, much to the credit of the hard working and dedicated family behind it. Thanks to the personal service and very human aspect to how they engage and service their customers online, they now have a steadily growing and incredibly loyal customer base who love them for their amazing coffee (it’s literally the best we’ve tasted) and also advocate fiercely for their continued success.

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Step 1 - Brand

Before we began working on the website, we worked closely with BE. AR. to define their brand. The key challenge here was to design a logo, typeface and base colour that would sit within their aspirations to launch a chain of cafes of varying themes. The brand had to balance between being strong enough to be instantly recognisable, yet subtle enough so as not to clash with or over power the theme of the cafe.

Step 2 - Strategy

Once branding and design was confirmed, we formulated a strategy to build out a social marketing funnel that relied heavily on social proof and user generated content. Once production began of print and signage assets to coincide with the launch, we began working on the subscription model e-commerce website. We identified customisations and planned email marketing and review workflows.

Step 3 - Design

Having already defined the brand, colour ways and typography, we jumped straight to creating a flow map to define customer journey and began populating the theme with design assets. We built the site and framework onto a live Shopify theme, created a visual style for product presentation and carried out usability testing in Adobe XD to ensure the best possible user experience.

Step 4 - Launch

Before launching the website, we set about thoroughly testing checkout flow across all 3 gateways, especially the subscription product up-sell, ensuring that it was not only easy to use but also profitable once overheads were all factored in, this is essential to work out marketing affordability and true ROI. We then connected the website to Google services, applied local SEO and integrated 3rd party marketing apps and cookie control to ensure GDPR compliance.

Step 5 - Market

Post launch, we built out a marketing funnel that spanned Facebook, Instagram and e-mail, leveraging customer reviews and user generated content. We led with a short term promotional offer aimed to get as much of the coffee into the hands of local coffee connoisseurs as we could, we used the social proof generated by this campaign to then expand the reach to the rest of the UK with great success. With pixel tracking in checkout, we remarketed and further increase audience accuracy to drive down CPA for future campaigns.