Meet Ross: The new face of Ross Street Roasting Co.

Today marks the first day of a new year - 2019 - and it also marks a new chapter in the story of Ross Street Roasting Co. For the past five months we've been working on a brand refresh for RSR, and in this blog post I'm going to introduce you to the most central & visible part of our new branding...

Ross is a red-eyed tree frog that is native to tropical forests from southern Veracruz and northern Oaxaca in Mexico, to central Panama and northern Colombia (see Wikipedia article for more).

When our branding consultant - Adam Feller of Avidity Creative - and I were sitting down to work on the new logo, we looked at a handful of first-round concepts he had come up with to see if any of them jumped out at me. Not seeing anything particularly striking, he then asked me if I had any pictures of anything coffee-related that might be iconic, maybe even animals, and I immediately thought of this...

This is a photo sent me to almost 2 years ago from Ben Weiner, Founder & CEO of Gold Mountain Coffee Growers, our Direct Trade partner in Nicaragua. We've been buying coffee from Gold Mountain since the beginning of Ross Street Roasting, going on 4 years now. Ben snapped this photo on their flagship farm, Finca Idealista ("Idealist Farm"), which we visited in March of 2018 and will be visiting again at the end of this month.

Adam and I were immediately in love with the frog idea and after a few rounds of artwork based on it, we landed on our new logo and our new mascot: The cute, happy coffee bean frog, Ross.

We did take some creative liberties with the coffee cherries/roasted beans - as a roaster of Specialty Coffee I pride myself on making high-grade, specialty coffee accessible to "normal" coffee drinkers, and it's simply a fact that most coffee drinkers have no idea that coffee beans are seeds from cherries that grow on shrubs/trees in tropical climates. So suspend your disbelief: He's sitting on roasted coffee beans. :) 

We're so excited to release Ross into the world. We think he's a great visual reflection of what we love doing: Happily bringing you awesome coffee from awesome producers around the coffee-growing world. 

Looking Back 1 Year Later

Hey folks - Roaster Brian here, just doing a quick look back on this blog post. We're now one year into the use of our new branding, with our frog mascot - Ross - at the center of that, and it's been great to have such a solid design/branding base to build off of. We've consistently received positive feedback on our logo, product packaging, website, etc. Continued praise and gratitude to Avidity Creative, whom we've continued to work with on product labels, product images, social media posts, and more.

Here's to many more years of success with such an awesome brand!