Explorer

Explorer elevates your day by making it effortless to customize specialty coffee shop beverages at home with a curated set of premium coffee and tea concentrates and enhancements.

Services:

• Brand Strategy
• Brand Voice
• Brand Identity
• Packaging Design
• Merchandise & Product Strategy

The TRUFFL

Founded by mountaineer, Cason Crane, Explorer isn’t simply a coffee company. Instead, the brand stands for elevating your day by seeking out the novel, the exciting, and the beautiful in order to experience vitality and joy in the everyday moments of our lives.

The Process

We engaged in in-depth discovery with the Explorer team learning about their founder Cason's unique story of climbing the highest seven mountains in the world to raise awareness and money for LGBT+ causes. We learned that his deeper motivation for his brand was not just to promote exploration of the outdoors, but also to encourage individuals to explore within themselves and discover new flavors that elevate the enjoyment of their favorite beverages. In addition, we engaged in independent trend analysis, competitor studies, and customer interviews to develop a defensible unique value proposition in the crowded CPG coffee industry.

Business Model

Based on the insight that the modern coffee and tea consumer craves customization at home, we helped Explorer reposition from solely offering coffee concentrates to offering a curated collection of coffees and teas with different levels of caffeine, organic flavor syrups, premium wellness boosts, and beverage-making accessories.

Brand Strategy

Explorer’s brand strategy is rooted in elevating your day. This positioning invites the brand to credibly speak to life and not simply its products. Whether it’s eating and drinking well, making time for the delightful, finding balance, indulging your senses, or connecting with others, Explorer believes elevating everyday moments helps make life worth living. This strategy seeks to charm consumers to never settle for unsatisfying routines and instead to discover and customize their favorite beverages.

Brand Identity

Our design approach eschewed the overly minimal and clean aesthetic employed by coffee brands like Jot and Blue Bottle in favor of a rich language that is both heritage and maximalist. Drawing inspiration from legacy perfumers and candle makers like Cire Trudon and Diptique, Explorer’s visual identity language is composed of detailed illustrations, ornate embellishments, gilded print finishes, high-quality materials, imaginative mixed type treatments, and bespoke shapes in order to impart an old-world and highly-decorative look & feel.

Packaging Design

Explorer’s brand identity truly shines when applied to its packaging. The brand offers a complex mix of over 28 products distinguished by flavor, size, caffeine level, and ingredients that can be used on their own or together. We prioritized cohesiveness and customization with equal weight in order to encourage the celebration of every product as unique while ensuring each product line would be viewed as a set. This meant creating a flexible packaging system that updated every element of packaging design for every product, including the name, illustration, border shape, logo treatment, colors, and layout system.

Testimonial

Cason Crane, CEO, states: "Raphael and Truffl are the sort of partner you dream of finding but don’t think you ever will: they are able to marry clear-sighted vision and strategic thinking and an exceptional eye for design...I couldn’t recommend Raphael and Truffl highly enough, and look forward to continuing to work with them in the future."