Making Coffee Fun Again:
OzU Brew Academy
_strategy_brand identity
_ux
_visual design
_photography
_videography
OzU Brew Academy is a club that focuses on brewing quality coffee and now with this rebrand, tea! The rebrand came just around a big festival that Brew Academy organized: Coffee Fast 2023. At that point the club was active for 1 year, since its establishment in January of 2023. Brew Academy saw a great succes in those two years, managing to steal hearts of 140 members in the first year, 260 and 500 in the following years.
Old
New
When we decided to change our visual identity, we knew that we had to do it for good. It had been only one year since the club presented itself to the world, and here we were to change our visual identity system without the existing one had marked its on the people’s minds. But we think that was to our advantage.
With the limited time the existing logo had, it showed signs of cracking in the rationale in terms of creating a visual identity, and expanding itself to feed our visual world.
As we started digging to come up with our new visual identity, we realized that our problem was bigger than the logo itself. And soon the project turned from a visual identity projet to a brand identity project.
We started with understanding our members. We had enough data since we could observe our audience through our regular events. Also comparing the recent regulars with the people who signed up in the first week, we got an important shift in our perspective as to who we were attracting and what the club meant for them.
We realized that the emphasis on the “Academy” characteristic of the club, and the attitude of “scientific coffee brewing” was a bit scary and it was pushing people who might be interested and find their next hobby at our club. Instead, people who already were interested in coffee was coming to the club. Which was not our mission, instead we were trying to make quality coffee more accessible and spread it a wider audience.
So with the new perspective, we shifted our identity from perspective perfection -> hobby and development. Because that was what it was: a hobby. And a hobby needs to be fun rather than all serious and scary. So that’s what we did. Converting our identity from an academy to a lifestyle/hobby club. And we believe we put something valuable to the table. Brew Academy rebranded itself in the May of 2023, with Coffee Fast. Next semester, the club nearly doubled its previous member count with 480 members, making it the 3rd biggest club at the campus.