Rebranding Napolicaffe

In 2022, one of my first jobs at the family’s coffee shop was to give it a face. It didn’t have one. The logo was an ornate script lifted straight from a template library; the file was named Gold_and_Black_Vintage_Logo.png, which tells you how much thought went into it. The homepage opened on stock photos of strangers holding mugs, not a single product in view. Every category hid behind a hamburger menu, and this was on desktop. The small stuff matched: an empty <title> tag, a 404 where the favicon should be, a theme still carrying the name of its test install. Nothing a customer could recognise, and nothing they could buy without digging for it.

The storefront in early 2022, reconstructed from a Wayback Machine capture and the original assets (full homepage).

The rebrand

I ran it myself, from scratch. The palette came from the sky-blue of the Napoli football team, an affectionate nod to the city the coffee comes from. For the logo we trialled a few and kept the most legible one; it had to work small and print cleanly on the custom shipping boxes. The template script became a plain sky-blue wordmark you could read at a glance.

The homepage changed the most. The old one led with mood photography and a tagline; the new one leads with coffee, prices and the day’s offers, so nothing sits between the customer and the product. Every category came out of the hamburger and into a real nav bar, next to promotions, customer service and who we are. And the invisible things a template-flip never gets around to finally got done: real page titles, a favicon, meta descriptions. Small, but it’s the difference between “a shop” and “our shop”.

Underneath all of it I set one value proposition: love the customer. Make them feel wanted, with the kind of attention you’d expect from somewhere far bigger than we were. When something went wrong, a delay or a mistake, even one that wasn’t ours, we’d overcorrect to make it right.

Result

An identity with a point of view, and a promise a customer could feel. I didn’t measure it properly at the time, which was my mistake, but from memory it brought roughly a 20% lower bounce rate and a slightly higher conversion. More than any number, “love the customer” became the thing people remembered us by.

This was the start, not the finish. The rebrand came before the growth years and before we sold the shop in 2024. I’m proud of it: I took what I’d learned about brands at P&G and put it to work on a small family business’s visual and brand identity, which is not where that knowledge usually ends up.