The 7Brew Rebrand That No One Asked For

I’ve decided to redesign the 7 Brew Coffee logo. I wasn’t asked to do it. No one at 7Brew has ever asked me anything beyond “What can I get you today?” But I still had to, because solving problems is fun.

But why mess with a successful brand? Because I love their brand. It represents a brilliant take on quick-serve coffee that I think is needed. An energetic and contagious optimism in service that’s become mysteriously rare since 2019. (Hmm what happened?) And when your brand has something unique like that, it deserves a great mark to ground all of that affinity it’s earning on the street.

So I’ll say it. 7Brew’s logo isn’t good. It has tension in it. Like a violent car wreck threw the letter ‘B’ into the number ‘7’, and I’m just wondering: Is the B is alright? How does the 7 feel? Is everyone okay here?

But this is the kind of logo you might get from a design contest for $500, which is exactly where it came from. Now I don’t mean to hate on the contest designers out there. I was one of them once upon a time. They’re mostly students, but when a company like 7Brew expands the way it has, it’s usually a good idea to re-examine the assumptions that were made in a $500 contest.

I wanted to do that rethinking, so I drew up a design that I thought played better. It swirls. It’s caffeinated. It’s cheerful. It feels like coffee and the vibe 7Brew puts around it. And it still says “7B,” just like the car wreck does. It just says it in a nicer way.

It’s a funny thing about brand design. The cost of the project is irrelevant. It’s the inherent value that really matters, but in order to test that value, it has to be shown to a number of people and measured for brand affinity lift. It has to be trialed to the right audiences. All of that costs significantly more than $500, but it’s worth it when the future of the company’s brand expansion is at play.

Whatever 7Brew decides to do, I think they need to kick off a rebrand. As always, I’d love to be involved, but I think there are a dozen amazingly skilled designers and agencies to choose from here in Northwest Arkansas, where the company found its roots to begin with.