Warm CupsWarm Hearts,Worldwide
Client
The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf
Agency
In-House
Services
Creative Direction
Ideation
Design
Styling
Copywriting
Recognition
The Dieline, Packaging of the World, World Branding Design, Yahoo Money, Trend Hunter, Thrillist, NBC So Cal.
We invited the world to join us in a universal toast
The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf is a global brand with stores spanning continents: from California to Cambodia. While each region celebrates the holidays in its own unique way, the brand needed a holiday campaign that felt inclusive, joyful, and globally resonant, without flattening cultural nuance.
The challenge was to create a holiday expression that could live everywhere, feel festive everywhere, and still feel distinctly Coffee Bean.
Coffee and tea are more than drinks: they’re shared rituals. No matter where you are in the world, we all gather around a cup.
For the holiday season, we invited the world to join us in a universal toast. The idea celebrated global unity by bringing together cultural symbols from around the world into a single, cohesive visual language. Individual elements like people, cultures, and traditions, come together to create something larger.
A common thread
As we explored holiday traditions across cultures, we noticed a recurring motif: hanging ornaments. Whether lanterns, stars, lights, or decorative objects, ornaments appear across the globe as symbols of celebration, warmth, and togetherness.
From Parol stars to Fanous lanterns to stockings, these forms became the foundation of our design system: a shared visual language rooted in cultural diversity and collective celebration.
Fully Festive Organic Social
To build excitement around the holiday cups and seasonal flavors, we created a suite of playful organic social content that leaned into decoration, motion, and delight. The content highlighted: seasonal drinks, ornament-driven storytelling, the warmth and joy of a shared holiday moment. Each piece reinforced the campaign’s core message while driving anticipation and engagement.
A robust and meaningful toolkit
In partnership with illustrator Carmi Grau, we developed a comprehensive holiday toolkit designed to flex across every touchpoint. The system included: custom ornaments inspired by global holiday traditions, flavor cues to highlight seasonal beverages, foliage and natural textures to ground the work in warmth and earthiness, playful holiday elements like mittens and gifts to amplify coziness and joy
The visual world was vibrant and youthful, anchored by icy blues and holiday candy reds, layered with texture and depth.
This toolkit powered a full 360 campaign: from print to digital, while staying cohesive, festive, and unmistakably on-brand.
Craft & Production: Complex Dielines, Elevated Finishes
Because the campaign spanned physical and digital spaces, the system had to work just as well on a cup as it did on a screen. For coffee packaging, I designed complex dielines and utilized foil, gloss, and matte finishes to create a multilayered, tactile experience that stood out on shelf and captured the magic of the season.
The same visual language translated seamlessly into animated assets, in-store signage, and house graphics.
Digital Ecosystem: Every Touchpoint, One Voice
Campaign imagery was strategically mapped to span all digital channels, including: organic and paid social, ecommerce (.com and retail partners like Amazon), modular email templates.
This ensured the holiday experience felt cohesive and immersive no matter where customers encountered the brand.
Digital Holiday Cards
To encourage participation and sharing, we created a set of sharable digital holiday cards for Instagram Stories, inviting customers to send a festive “cheers” and spread the universal toast with their own communities.
By focusing on shared rituals instead of specific traditions, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf was able to create a holiday moment that felt warm, inclusive, and genuinely global.
