Coffee Baby & Kids

Background

Coffee Baby & Kids is dedicated to making children's clothing. It is a family-owned Argentine company, established in 1983, led by Ignacio Klappenbach.

Coffee once had more than fifteen locations in Argentina and exported to Chile, Paraguay, Mexico, Uruguay, Peru, and Bolivia. Several years passed, and the textile industry began to suffer serious difficulties: the economic crises in the country, along with the importation of clothing and the decline in sales in the domestic market, resulted in the loss of more than 17,000 jobs between 2015 and 2018. The situation was becoming increasingly difficult, and in May 2018 Ignacio was considering closing Coffee.

“Nacho is my brother-in-law; he is married to my wife's older sister. I was aware of the situation and wanted to help him by adding value through design,” comments Gonzalo Berro.

Nacho, for his part, always admired the work of Grupo Berro, but felt that Coffee could not invest in a studio of our caliber.

“At the end of 2018, during a study trip I took at Yale, the case of Target and its clothing sales strategy was discussed in one of the talks. After thinking about it, I wrote a WhatsApp message to Nacho because I believed we could do a great job for Coffee.”

– Gon, I have no resources; the company is even late in paying salaries, and I’m analyzing whether I can continue with the business.

– Don’t worry, Nacho. Let’s try it, and if it works out well, we’ll see.

– Let’s do this instead: if it works, I’ll allocate a percentage of the profits.

Idea

Coffee's product was excellent, and its quality was on par with international brands. But it lacked the right attitude.

With its history, what Coffee was demonstrating was its attitude: the value of family, always looking ahead, and seeking the utmost quality and attention. There was the idea: in the attitude. We needed to awaken that attitude and convey it.

Development

Coffee needed to renew itself, show that -as a brand- it was attentive to changes, not only technological ones -selling in-store or through e-commerce- but also aware of the changes in its customers.

We decided to present Coffee Baby & Kids as a more updated brand, but above all as a brand that understands change, development, and the growth of people.

We proposed a color change, appealing to a combination of blues and oranges, and a new brand design, with an exclusive typographic alphabet that presented the logo in a looser way, and consequently, more “fresh,” like its users, the kids.

Once the brand was defined, we sought to add an imprint from the major European chains, working on their bags, labels, and even their scent.

From the Multimedia Design area, we fed social media with the same idea: childhood is attitude, and each child is different. With these axes -combined with the product's quality- Eduardo Paso Viola, one of the partners within Grupo Berro, led the social media strategy, restoring Coffee's attitude, spirit, and charisma.

Result

By applying the new brand to all visual contact points -stores, graphics, website, social media- the Coffee team members felt revitalized, eager to do more. Coinciding with a new financial engineering and the incorporation of new processes, partners from other countries requested renovations, at their own expense, for their stores because they empathized so much with the new design.

The salespeople, who travel the country with the new catalogs developed by Grupo Berro, were excited to see how “the new brand” showcased their products. “Everyone tells me the same thing,” Nacho told me, “that this way it is much easier to sell: people see the catalog, and it’s something else; they realize that Coffee is something else.”

The design must achieve that: to stand out. And in terms of results, Coffee not only got its accounts up to date -of course, thanks to integrated decisions that cannot be attributed exclusively to design- but it also represented a return on its sales for Grupo Berro.

From thinking about closing all operations to renewing stores and venturing into e-commerce, the Coffee case demonstrates, in our view, how strategic design positively impacts the client's business.