Orbit
A roastery that ships on a schedule. Identity, a packaging system that scales to forty rotating lots a year, and a subscription flow that reads like a calendar.
- Client
- Orbit Roasters
- Year
- 2024
- Scope
- Identity, packaging system, commerce design
- Team
- Two designers, one writer
- Output
- One label grid, nine printed variants
Everyone sells the farm. Orbit sells the return.
Specialty coffee packaging had converged: a wash of colour, a mountain, a paragraph about altitude and a farmer's name in a script face. Beautiful, interchangeable, and useless on a shelf where nine bags do the same thing.
Orbit's actual product is not a place, it is a rhythm — the same six roasts coming back around, roasted to a curve they publish. So we designed the rhythm and let origin be a data point rather than a mood.
We printed the roast curve on the bag. It is the most honest graphic the category has, and nobody was using it. Marshmallow, project note
One grid, nine bags
A single label grid with four fixed zones — lot, curve, date, method. New lots drop into the grid without a designer touching the file, which is what makes forty releases a year survivable.
Colour by roast, not by whim
The ramp runs cream to ember across the roast spectrum. Two bags side by side tell you which is darker before you read a word — the palette is a measurement, so it can never be applied incorrectly.
A subscription that looks like time
The checkout was rebuilt around a calendar strip rather than a plan table. You pick the weeks you want coffee to arrive; price follows. Pausing is one tap and never asks why.
- Raw · FDF6EE
- Light · EDA765
- Medium · D9762F
- Dark · 8C3113
- Ember · 22100A
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Stand in the shop
Three mornings behind the counter. Nobody read the back of a bag. Everyone asked one of two questions: how dark is it, and when was it roasted.
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Answer those two questions loudly
The curve and the roast date became the largest elements on the label. The tasting notes moved to the side seam, where they belong.
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Hand over a grid, not artwork
The team ships new lots themselves from a template with locked zones. We wrote the rules as a two-page sheet rather than a forty-page manual nobody opens.
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Rebuild the subscription last
Commerce came after the shelf, because the bag is what people meet first and the checkout has to sound like the same brand talking.
