Beloved Brooklyn Coffeemakers Rebrand As Partners Coffee

Established in Williamsburg, New York in 2012, Toby's Estate Coffee had created a name and cozy community for itself with five neighborhood cafes around the city and national wholesale programs with Dean & Deluca, Whole Foods, Amazon and more.

As the brand grew in popularity, founders Amber Jacobsen and Adam Boyd decided it was time to reinvent the brand identity starting with a new name, Partners Coffee. The motive stemmed from the fact that Toby's Estate Coffee Roasters is a beloved coffee purveyor in Australia, which was fine when Partners was only operating in the U.S. independently, but it no longer made sense as they wanted to expand.

While it's hard to say goodbye to a name and identity that helped grow the brand, Partners Coffee is the next step in moving towards an ethos that they are “only as great as the sum of [their] partners.” In fact, the name itself is a direct reflection of the gratitude for all the individuals around the globe who make their business possible from the farmers and distributors to the customers and wholesalers.

For their relaunch, they reached out to James Beard Award-winning branding and creative agency, Love & War.

Collectively, they decided to pay homage to the heritage coffee brands and classic simplicity of old-school New York coffee counters, which resulted in a saturated and playful color palette featuring cyan blue, warm mustard yellow, classic red, Kelly green and more that played well together. Then, they created a custom logo font for Partners and used the classic sans serif typeface designed by Adrian Frutiger and Avenir for the brand writing.

If you're familiar with the monochromatic, modern designs of Toby's Estate Coffee, you'll notice Partners Coffee is not only a vibrant pivot from where they started, but it's also an easy way for the brand to evolve and expand over time as they introduce new products.

Through all the rebranding and reinventing, the company remains very much the same. Partners Coffee continues to lessen their footprint on the planet and has teamed up with coffee bag producer Savor who utilize waste-free manufacturing practices and offer zero-waste compost solutions. All you have to do is ship back your old, used coffee bags with the prepaid shipping label and the bags will be shredded, pelletized and repurposed into materials like garbage bins and watering cans, meaning it will never be incinerated or tossed into a landfill. They also continue to take coffee education seriously and offer classes like Introduction to Cupping and Home Brew Methods.

Rebranding can be difficult, but when it represents a shift in identity as well as a commitment to your community and suppliers, it can create a new opportunity to flourish and in this case, expand globally and take over the world with your exquisite packaging.

Photographer: Nico Schinco