Branding

Meowlette

Services Branding · Identity · Packaging

Client Meowlette

Year 2024

Overview

Meowlette is an all-day breakfast and coffee spot on New York's Lower East Side, where omelettes meet espresso and every order comes with a little mischief. The brief was a brand with nine lives: playful enough to live on a coffee cup, bold enough to hold a street.

We built the identity around one unforgettable character: a wide-eyed black cat with two sunny-side eggs for eyes, equal parts mascot, logo and inside joke.

Challenge

A neighbourhood full of specialty cafés all speak the same quiet, minimalist language. Meowlette needed to break the beige, to feel instantly recognisable from across the street, and endlessly re-usable across cups, bags, signage and merch, without ever losing its charm at a smaller size.

Solution

We anchored the brand to a hand-drawn wordmark with a wonky, characterful lean, and a flexible cat-and-egg motif that stretches from a full illustration down to a two-egg wink.

A high-voltage yellow and off-black palette keeps everything loud but appetising, while playful lines ("Serving purrs and omelettes daily", "Get egg-cited", "Brewed happiness") give the brand a voice that's impossible to ignore.

The wordmark is drawn to feel hand-made, never mechanical, and it holds its personality in black on white, white on yellow, white on black and black on blue, so the brand stays unmistakably Meowlette on any surface.

Meowlette: the yellow and black takeaway cups

The system was built packaging-first. Kraft-yellow bags, dual-tone cups and gable boxes all carry the cat, so the brand travels home with every order: a walking, sipping billboard for the café.

Out of the café, the character scales up without breaking a sweat, from A-frame pavement signs and shopfront lettering to full-size billboards that let the cat crash the wordmark.

Conclusion

Meowlette launched with a brand that behaves like its mascot: curious, confident and impossible to forget: a look that's as at home on a takeaway cup as it is four metres tall on a hoarding.