BRAND IDENTITY CASE STUDY
SIX Coffee
A name and a brand system built to grow across a city.
The Brief
City Catering had the chance to open a coffee shop inside the council's main building in Stoke-on-Trent's Smithfield development — a high-footfall civic space that would put it in direct competition with the high-street coffee chains people already knew and trusted. The brief was simple to state and hard to deliver: create a brand confident enough to hold its own on the high street, but rooted enough in the local area that people would feel it belonged to them.
I was asked to develop the whole concept from the ground up — not just the look, but the name itself.
The Idea
I started where I usually do: research … this was a council-run service, created by the local authority to serve local people, so I started learning about the local area, looking for a story that could carry the brand rather than decorate it.
Stoke-on-Trent formed in 1910 from a federation of six local towns, Burslem, Fenton, Hanley, Longton, Stoke-upon-Trent and Tunstall.
Nothing defines the Potteries skyline more than the bottle kiln — huge brick ovens that once numbered in the thousands .
The swirling ribbons of steam rising off a fresh cup of coffee mirrored the almost organic shape of the bottle kilns … an idea was starting to form!
Those three threads — the number six for the six towns, the bottle kiln silhouette, and steam off a cup — became one mark: SIX Coffee, a logo built from two interlocking forms that came together to create a unified shape that echoed the three key themes, and presented in the black, white and green already associated with the City Catering parent brand.
Note: This was a number of years before the opening of the unrelated Restaurant Six at the Hilton Garden Inn within the same Smithfield development area.
Building the System
Once the concept was signed off, I built it out into a full identity: typography, colour system, and a working set of applications designed for a real, busy café environment. City Catering used the finished brand in their bid for the Smithfield coffee shop, and won it.
Flexing the System
The brand was always designed with room to grow — a mark built from simple geometric forms travels well. When City Catering later had the opportunity to bid for a café site inside one of the city's parks, I adapted the identity with a softer, stone-grey and blue palette to sit alongside that location's existing character, while keeping the core mark, name and structure intact. It's a good test of any identity: can it flex without losing itself? This one could.
Further proof came a couple of years later, when City Catering won a contract to run bistro dining across two residential care sites. Rather than start from scratch, we again extended the SIX family and created SIX Bistro, built directly off the existing coffee shop identity.
In Their Own Words ...
SIX was a completely new venture that needed to be presented to a board of key decision-makers, making it essential that the brand was both professional and polished, while also being distinctive and engaging enough to resonate with local residents. Philip developed the name SIX, drawing inspiration from the area's heritage, which is rooted in the six towns that make up the city.
This concept provided a strong sense of local identity and community connection, while also creating a flexible brand that could be successfully adapted and applied to other locations across the city should future opportunities arise.
Philip has worked across three distinct areas of our business, creating standalone brands for each. He has consistently balanced creativity with practicality, producing designs that not only capture the attention of existing and potential customers but are also functional and effective across a range of applications.
ROSE EAGLES, CITY CATERING