Design has been central to Look Alive from the beginning, and nearly all of our creative work happens in-house. Kelly, our co-owner, studied design at SCAD and worked professionally as a designer before Look Alive, so design has always been a natural part of how we think about things.

When we launched in February 2024, our packaging was pretty straightforward: standard printed coffee bags that we bought in bulk to keep costs down. They worked, but about six months in, we started to feel like they weren't really representative of where the brand was going.

Additionally, we felt like our brand had matured, and we wanted to solve the mismatch between where we started and what we had grown into. The goal wasn't simply to create a coffee package. It was to create an experience that felt tangible, memorable, and authentic to the brand.

So where to next?

We've always been influenced by things outside of coffee - art, design, music, photography, books, magazines, record sleeves and punk/DIY culture. So we started looking at packaging from other industries for inspiration.

We were drawn to objects that people actually want to keep, display or revisit. Fragrance was a particularly good reference point. The packaging is often an important part of the experience rather than something that's immediately thrown away.

We wanted to bring some of that thinking into coffee without making it feel overly precious or like we were trying to turn a bag of coffee into a luxury product.

That's where the box came in.

Seven months of figuring it out

The entire packaging system was designed in-house by Kelly and took about seven months from the first concept to the final product.

A lot of that time went into things that aren't necessarily obvious when you look at the finished box: figuring out the structure, how the different pieces would fit together, how the photography would work and what we wanted the experience of opening it to actually feel like.

There were a lot of iterations.

Doing everything in-house gave us the freedom to keep experimenting and refining without having to hand the project off or try to explain the brand to someone else. We could keep asking whether something actually made the package better or whether we were just adding another detail because we could.

A container for the chaos

We also wanted the new packaging to solve a different problem: how to make Look Alive stand out without losing what makes it Look Alive.

We thought about this a lot after a trip to Montreal, where we visited a number of cafés carrying coffee from multiple roasters. Many had large walls displaying coffee from different companies. There were a lot of beautiful bags, but after a while, they started to look pretty similar.

We didn't want to be different just to be different. We wanted something that actually felt like our brand.

Look Alive has always been a little chaotic. We're interested in a lot of different things, and we don't want to narrow that down into one visual identity that never changes.

We needed a container for the chaos. The box gives us that. The structure stays consistent, but everything inside it can change.

The artwork was part of the idea from the beginning

We knew we wanted photography to be central to the packaging from the start.

Each coffee features a different photograph from a photographer we've partnered with or an artist whose work we admire. The back of the photograph doubles as a postcard, so you can remove it from the box and actually do something with it.

The coffee might be gone in a couple of weeks, but the artwork can stick around much longer. 

It also gives us the freedom to keep changing things. We can work with new photographers, create limited releases, use hand-screen-printed postcards or try something completely different without redesigning the entire package every time.

We've already heard from customers who collect the postcards, frame them or send them to friends. We didn't necessarily set out to create a collector's item, but we're not mad about it.

Opening the box

We spent a lot of time thinking about what happens between picking up the box and actually making the coffee. We wanted the experience to feel interactive without feeling precious.

It starts with the tear strip. When you open the box, it reveals our signature green and the words “Play For Keeps.”

For us, Play For Keeps is about taking the things you care about seriously. Make the art. Start the project. Build the relationship. Learn the skill. Pay attention. The things that make you feel alive are worth investing in.

From there, the box unfolds through a few smaller discoveries: the full photograph, the postcard on the back, and finally the coffee itself in a bag featuring our green skull.

None of these things are particularly complicated. We just wanted opening the coffee to feel like more than tearing open a bag and throwing the packaging away.

An extension of Look Alive

We don't want Look Alive to look exactly the same five years from now as it does today. We want to keep collaborating with artists, trying new ideas, and occasionally doing things just because we think they're cool.

We also don't think better packaging makes better coffee. At the end of the day, the coffee has to be good. The packaging can make a memorable first impression, but it can't replace what's inside.

What it can do is create a little more room for the things we care about. The packaging has become one of the clearest expressions of what we want Look Alive to be: serious about the work without being overly serious in how we present it, and a place where coffee, art, photography and design can naturally overlap.

Photos: eternalcandorstudios.com