FBR Café: Brand, Design, Media and Web
Founding creative collaborator on a tech-forward specialty coffee bar hidden in Sydney's Chambers Arcade, and on FBR ROM, the startup that grew out of it, building AI-driven tools that make coffee closer to a game.
The brief
FBR ROM doesn't operate like a coffee company. It operates like a tech startup that happens to make coffee, with engineers and designers on staff building the machinery in-house. Its measuring systems capture variables that used to go unrecorded, like how a barista pours.
The café sits tucked inside Chambers Arcade, in a part of the CBD nobody walks past by accident. So the real task wasn't selling a café. It was building an audience for a coffee-tech product before it existed, and getting that audience fluent in coffee, tech and the culture that connects them.
Three doors in
We split the audience into three: coffee, tech and music. Each comes in through its own obsession, and the strategy uses that entry point to walk them toward the other two.
That meant the social output couldn't look like café marketing. It pulled from music crowds, sci-fi visuals and a design language lifted from the Game Boy: limitation-driven design, more from less. Every reference point is specific to the brand and reinforces the same identity, so entering through any one door eventually leads you through all three. CNC Offline, the night-time event built for the music side, is the clearest example.
What I did
- Brand. Positioning, visual identity, voice and the house style used across every channel.
- Copy. All written output: website, product pages, social, email, promotional and print.
- Community. Grew the audience and the email list through Cuts n Cups, a co-promoted event series pairing DJs with specialty roasters. Each partner's audience became a way to reach new customers.
- Social and content. Ran social as an always-on program, producing long-form and short-form video, photography and static assets (example post).
- FBR DEX. Designed and built the startup's web platform in Next.js, TypeScript, React Three Fiber and D3.
- mDOT. Product marketing for FBR's (unreleased) coffee mass recorder: positioning, landing page, 3D product viewer, Kickstarter campaign, product interface design and sound design.
Results
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| 0 to 5,000+ followers | |
| Email list | 1,000+ subscribers |
| Cuts n Cups | 19+ editions, plus cuppings, workshops and a festival |
Do Good Things Better: Coffee and Culture Festival