Complete with a coffee-sipping mascot, Happycentro brews a brand world for MUI Coffee Roastery

When MUI Coffee Roastery, a roasting shop based in Kawasaki City, Kanagawa, Japan began looking for a refreshed identity and packaging, they knew they wanted to work with someone with an equal reverence for and love of coffee. Who better than Italians? The roastery teamed up with Verona-based design studio Happycentro to unpack its brand story and devise an identity that perfectly captured its mastery of coffee. To begin with, MUI wanted the brand to have a mascot, and this spoke to the Italian team at Happycentro. “There are many historic Italian brands in the food and beverage sector that have extraordinary and effective mascots that have made advertising history in our country. To add a touch of Italian-ness, we drew inspiration from some of these – the Bialetti little man, Lavazza mascots, and others,” Founder & Creative Director Federico Galvani tells us. The team began with a hatted, stocky figure with a big nose, but MUI soon came in with a request to base the mascot on the shop owner, Mr. Osawa. “Keeping the hat, we reworked everything else and created a more slender and appealing figure. We then proposed to represent the mascot in different situations and poses, to extend the visual narrative and bring the character to life. It was a lot of fun!” The mascot can now be seen all across the brand, sipping his pour over coffee, or roasting the carefully selected beans. The beans, in fact, show up in many places – such as the illustrations, the art direction, and also atop the ‘M’ and ‘I’ in the custom-designed wordmark. “The typeface for the wordmark was designed by Mattia Cristini, one of our designers who worked on the project. It was his idea to reference old typeset poster fonts, reinterpreting the forms of Egyptian typography,” says Galvani. “The dots over the ‘M’ and ‘I’ represent a concealed element of continuity with the previous logo, but now, with this form, they create a more precise reference to coffee beans and conceptually represent the moment of meeting between two or more individuals – a perfect situation for enjoying a good coffee.” The ovals turn into two faces in one of the animations created by Happycentro, nodding to the meeting of people and the communal aspect of sharing a cup of coffee with a friend.