A New Passenger

By Evan Howe

As we kick off the New Year, all of us at Passenger are very excited to announce our brand new look! While our first visual identity served us well over the last 5 years, it was developed right at the beginning - before we really knew who we were or what we were going to become. Having experienced a healthy amount of growth and change since our start as a company, we wanted to update our brand to more accurately reflect where we are now and aspects of our vision for the future. For much of 2019, our leadership team worked with Infantree, a local Lancaster design agency, to identify and clarify the core values that have come to define Passenger and develop a new visual identity and brand narrative that effectively communicates these values.

We couldn’t be more pleased with the results of this collaboration, in particular: a visual aesthetic that is cleaner and simpler, a new website that offers enhanced opportunities for discovery, and a narrative that will more clearly and consistently inform our work moving forward. In what follows, we want to highlight a few of the key values that informed the development of Passenger’s new brand.

Continue reading below.

 

Intentionality

A core value for us is the belief that intentionality has a real impact: for our supply chain partners, for our guests, for our local community, for ourselves. Another way of saying this is that we think being thoughtful about our work matters, and that this mindset has been central to what we have been most proud of at Passenger thus far. Intentionality is reflected in every aspect of what we do, from the way we structure our sourcing partnerships, to our meticulous commitment to green coffee preservation, to the philosophies that inform roasting, quality control, and extraction, to the way that we design our retail spaces, to the mindset that guides our approach to education and hospitality.

Passenger Team Tea Training

Experience

From the beginning, calling our company “Passenger” was a reference to experience. And we continue to think of experience as central to everything we do. Experience refers to the aesthetic and sensory journey that an extraordinary coffee or tea can offer, it refers to the positive feeling that we hope a guest experiences when stepping into one of our retail spaces or exploring our online offerings, and most importantly, experience sums up the vital importance of the producers that we form partnerships with and our commitment to pursuing ongoing business with them in the hope that their experience working with us will be a viable, lasting, and meaningful.

Gaiwan Tea Bar @ Passenger's King St. Location

Storytelling

We think a significant part of the value that we can add as a company is to serve as a matchmaker: putting memorable coffees and teas in the hands of people who will enjoy them and sharing stories from the time and place of production. We hope that this added context will enhance the experience of enjoying these beverages and empower individuals in the consuming world to assume an active role as stakeholders in a more transparent and ethical supply chain.

Sustainability

While we have always pursued sustainable environmental practices in all aspects of our business, our recent journey to Bcorp certification was an incredibly valuable opportunity to think about the many ways that we wish to hold ourselves to higher standards. Revisiting our packaging affording an opportunity to make a positive change on this front. For our updated coffee packaging we’ve switched to Biotrē™ 2.0 bags which are made of 60% compostable and 100% renewable materials. The hope is that a 100% compostable bag, currently under development, will be available in the future.

NEW Biotrē™ 2.0 Compostable Bag

We are thrilled to build upon this new visual foundation as we continue on our mission to seek out and thoughtfully present the world’s most memorable coffee and tea in a way that
demonstrates the viability of an equitable supply chain.