Monopo’s lino-carved mascot brings walking rituals to NKORA Coffee

When NKORA reached out to Monopo for a rebrand, the brief came with a tension that many growing independents face. Over 10 years and seven locations, the London coffee chain had retained everything that makes a neighbourhood shop special – that lived-in warmth, the lack of corporate polish, the sense that someone actually cares. But with coffee increasingly becoming a grab-and-go experience, the identity needed to catch up without smoothing away the character that made NKORA worth visiting in the first place. The solution didn’t come from thinking about coffee at all. Instead, Monopo looked at the ritual that surrounds it – the walk. Co-founders Nancy and Emile Mehmet had always approached coffee with a certain contemplative quality, the kind of pause that happens during a quiet stroll when your mind settles and you start noticing things. That overlap between walking and drinking coffee became the conceptual anchor. Where most takeaway brands lean into speed and efficiency, NKORA would do the opposite, owning the slower pace of moving with intention. This thinking led to Miles, a hand-carved lino character who embodies that reflective quality. Created outside the confines of a screen, Miles was born through an imperfect, tactile process – each frame carved into lino sheets, then printed, digitised and animated. The character captures something specific: that quiet contentment of being mid-walk, present but not rushed. The lino work presented its own set of challenges. “Every slip and scratch is permanent, and that permanence gives the work a sort of honesty you can’t fake,” Designer Sam Beaton explains. “Many nearly-finished sheets that had been worked on for hours suddenly have to get fully discarded because of a single wrong glide, but these frustrations and realisations end up becoming the soul of the system.” The resistance of the medium produced something digital processes can’t replicate – those wonky cuts and slight imperfections that signal human hands at work. When scanned and refined, the key was restraint, keeping enough texture alive without over-cleaning the imperfections that gave each print its character.