//Consumer beverage · Brand identity and launch
How Romée Went From a Name to a Brand, Four Cans and a Store
Romée is a doctor-founded clean energy drink launching later this year. It came to us as a name and a formula. We built everything else: the wordmark and logo kit, the palette and type system, the flavor names, four print-ready can labels, the carton, the launch creative, and a Shopify storefront that was taking pre-orders, talking to distributors and ready for retail before the first can was filled.
The goal
Give a new beverage brand everything it needs to exist on a shelf and sell online, finished before production, so no launch demand is wasted.
Services used
- Brand identity
- Packaging design
- Print-ready production files
- Shopify storefront
- Technical SEO
The lineup. Four flavors, one wordmark, gold foil on every can.
The challenge
Most consumer brands launch with a landing page and a waitlist, then scramble to bolt on a store, a wholesale process and retail tooling once demand shows up. Every week of that scramble is a week of sales that do not happen. Romée had three specific problems to solve before a single can existed.
A brand nobody had heard of, in the most crowded aisle in retail
Energy drinks is a category dominated by enormous incumbents and defined by loud, aggressive design. Romée needed to look like the opposite of that and still read as energy, not as sparkling water, in the half second someone spends scanning a shelf or a feed. There was a name and a formula. There was no logo, no color, no type, no flavor names, and no can.
No way to capture demand before launch
Interest generated before a product ships is the cheapest demand a brand will ever get, and most of it evaporates because there is nowhere to put it. Without commerce running, every pre-launch conversation ends in nothing.
Nothing for a retail buyer, a distributor or a printer to look at
Wholesale conversations move at the speed of the material you can send. A brand that answers a buyer with a PDF and a promise loses to one that answers with a live page, a product lineup, and a store locator already waiting for its first pin. And a can printer needs production files with bleed, separations and barcodes, not a mockup.
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Sound familiar?
Most owners recognize at least one of these. The fix is usually smaller than the problem looks, and the first conversation costs nothing.
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The results
The result of this engagement is the brand. Everything below is a delivered file or a live page.
//The wordmark
Set in light, wide-tracked caps. Generous letter-spacing reads calm and expensive, and the thin strokes are where the gold foil sings. Delivered as a six-colorway kit, Espresso, Gold, Peach, Teal, Black and White, each as vector and PNG.
//The palette
Peach
#F4B97E
Citrus Recharge
Mint
#B8DAB0
Matcha Focus
Coral
#F2A9A0
Berry Energy
Sky
#BBD3E6
Strawberry Hydrate
Gold
#C8A24C
Foil signature, every can
Espresso
#4E3C33
Wordmark and copy
Sunwashed: brighter California pastels, sunny and fresh. Each flavor owns a color. The fruit illustration and the small copy on each can are a darker tone of the same color, so every can reads as one quiet monochrome with gold on top.
//The type
ROMÉE
Josefin Sans, light, wide-tracked caps. The wordmark and the flavor names.
Sparkling energy drink. Organic caffeine, monk fruit and agave. Nothing artificial. 12 fl oz.
Figtree for everything read up close: ingredients, benefits, the story on the back of the can, the website.
//The cans
Citrus Recharge
Orange, lemon, lime, ginger
Energy + Metabolism · 125 mg caffeine
Matcha Focus
Matcha, lemon
Focus + Clarity · 85 mg caffeine
Berry Energy
Watermelon, strawberry
Pre-Workout · 150 mg caffeine
Strawberry Hydrate
Strawberry, lime
Hydration + Glow · 100 mg caffeine
Names follow one rule: the flavor plus a clear benefit, so the function sells itself from across the cooler. Three benefit icons on every can, in gold.
//Print-ready packaging
What the printer receives
- Four labels at 193 × 150 mm, with bleed and trim, one per SKU
- Nutrition Facts panel and full ingredient statement, set to the FDA layout
- UPC barcode assigned per SKU, QR code to the site, recycling and state deposit marks
- Native Illustrator files with the separations the printer needs, gold effect included
- The story panel, the benefit icons, and the wordmark as locked vector
The carton
A 12-can variety pack on kraft, the wordmark in gold foil, the four flavors visible from the top so the case sells the range before it is opened. Built from the same system as the cans, so shelf, case and website all read as one brand.
//The storefront
Direct
Full Shopify checkout taking pre-orders from day one. Four product pages and a variety pack, each written to sell one flavor to one moment.
Wholesale
A dedicated portal for distributors and retail buyers to apply and order at trade pricing, so a buyer gets a link instead of an attachment.
Retail
A store locator built and waiting for the first shelf. Product imagery prepared for both the Shopify listings and Amazon.
The storefront was live and taking pre-orders before the first can was filled.
//Launch creative
The can in the world it is made for: the coast, the gym, the afternoon. Built for the feed and the product pages before there was a photographer on payroll.
Want this for your business?
None of this happened by accident.
It came from a process, and the process runs for clients too. Ask what it would look like on your numbers.
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How we did it
Four workstreams, in the order a brand actually needs them.
Chose the type on evidence, not on taste
Type has a measurable personality: rounded reads friendly, condensed reads athletic, wide tracking reads expensive. We set the target first, premium, modern, athletic enough for a gym cooler, with the polish of gold foil, then ran a study across four font families against it and put every option in front of the founder side by side.
The wordmark landed on Josefin Sans in light, wide caps. Figtree carries everything read up close. Flavor names follow one rule, the flavor plus a clear benefit, which is how Citrus Recharge, Matcha Focus, Berry Energy and Strawberry Hydrate were chosen.
Six palette directions, one chosen
Gold foil was the signature from the start. Around it we built six full directions, Atelier, Editorial, Noir Gold, Sport-Luxe, Clinic and Sunwashed, each shown on the can so the decision was made on shelf presence rather than swatches.
Sunwashed won: California pastels, one per flavor, with the fruit and the fine print as a darker tone of the same hue. It is the opposite of the energy aisle, and still unmistakably energy.
Designed the cans for the press, not the screen
A can label is a production document. Each of the four was built at 193 by 150 mm with bleed and trim, an FDA-format Nutrition Facts panel, the full ingredient statement, a UPC per SKU, a QR to the site, and the story panel on the back.
Everything was built in native Illustrator files with the separations a can printer needs, so the gold on the wordmark prints as gold and not as a yellow approximation. The same system produced the 12-pack carton and the business cards.
Shipped a real storefront, not a waitlist
Full Shopify commerce with cart and checkout, taking pre-orders from day one. Four product pages and a variety pack, each written to sell one flavor to one moment. A wholesale portal for distributors and buyers, and a store locator built and waiting for its first pin.
Underneath: our story, FAQ, contact, shipping, returns, privacy and terms in the brand's voice, a consent banner with a real decline button, and Organization structured data so search engines know who the brand is from the first crawl.
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Every one of these moves is repeatable.
Some will fit your business and some will not. Ten minutes on the phone tells us which.
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Business impact
Romée starts commercial life owning what most beverage startups rent: a wordmark, a palette and a type system that are its own, four cans ready for the press, and a store already open. When a distributor asks for information, the brand sends a link. When the printer asks for files, the files exist.
The strategic point is timing. Building the brand and the store after demand appears means paying for attention twice, once to earn it and again to re-earn it when there was nowhere to send it. Romée will not have that problem.
Want this for your business?
The fastest way to find out is to ask.
Tell us where you are and what you have tried. We will tell you plainly what we would do, and what we would not.
Not ready? Keep reading
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