Tonx

An online coffee subscription service bringing great coffee to your door within 24 hours of roasting. Tonx was acquired by Blue Bottle Coffee in 2014 for their tech capabilities to expand their customer reach.

+ Visual Design
+ Identity Design
+ Product Development

In the seemingly mundane craft coffee landscape, the founders of Tonx had a different vision for their subscription service.

[In the abstract] Tonx was born out of a frustration with high end of coffee becoming increasingly wrapped up in it's own legacy—becoming unapproachable and often hollow. Good coffee was unnecessarily complicated, hard to navigate and hard to obtain.

Above:
Initial moodboard components

Tonx found themselves in a category that was largely theirs to define, with a product that could be an iconic staple in people's mailboxes every week. The analogy the team often used was that coffee is more like a newspaper or magazine (needs to be fresh, of it's moment) whereas wine or beer are more like books (can live on a shelf, be revisited anytime).

Tonx dashboard - plans

Payment info

Coffee tracking / rating

Current release rating

Logged out marketing page - header graphic by Ferris Plock

The contrast of a super tech driven product/high-end craft coffee/90's nostalgia made for a really unique creative exercise that allowed us to broadly redefine what the face of craft coffee could look like, end-to-end. Tonx was acquired by Blue Bottle Coffee in 2014.