How we did it.

Frida's Coffee Home

Small Business

Brochures & Collaterals

Frida's Coffee Home is an award-winning, family-owned Calgary cafe founded in 2022 by Frida Murillo and Zaheen Hamidani, built around the mission of bringing authentic Mexican coffee culture to Canada. Sourcing direct trade beans from high-altitude farms in Chiapas, Veracruz, and Guerrero and roasting them in small batches in Calgary, Frida's is as serious about the story behind the coffee as the coffee itself. Blair and Co. designed the retail packaging for the Frida's Coffee Home bag range, creating a suite of illustrated, region-specific designs that turn every bag into a small piece of Mexico on a shelf in Calgary.

Frida's Coffee Home is inspired by the Mexican concept of Pueblo Magico, the designation given to towns in Mexico renowned for their history, culture, beauty, and culinary heritage. Each coffee the brand sources comes from a specific region with its own landscape, character, and flavour profile. The Chiapas Chocolate Coati and the Veracruz Vanilla Toucan are not just product names. They are regional stories told through the beans. The vision for the retail packaging was to honour those stories visually, giving each bag an illustrated world that captured the warmth, colour, and cultural life of the region it came from, while building a collectible, shelf-worthy product that could hold its own in specialty retail alongside the most design-forward coffee brands in Canada. The packaging needed to feel joyful and artisan without being naive, and distinctly Mexican without relying on cultural shorthand. It needed to make a person who had never heard of Frida's Coffee Home want to pick it up.

Methodology

Blair and Co. developed a packaging illustration system that gave each regional blend its own visual world within a consistent structural framework. The arched label panel at the front of each bag was treated as a window into the region the coffee came from, with a full illustrated landscape scene unique to each blend. The Chiapas bag depicted a coastal church, rolling green hills, tropical wildlife, a coati, and the warm golden sun of southern Mexico. The Veracruz bag captured the celebratory energy of the region with fireworks, a waterfront village scene, tropical birds, and the festival atmosphere that defines the culture of that coastal state. Both illustrations used a warm, folk-art-influenced palette of sky blue, tropical green, earthy brown, and golden sun tones that felt authentically rooted in Mexican visual culture without being a pastiche of it. The Frida’s Coffee Home logo, rendered in clean white script, anchored the top of the arched label on both bags, with the regional name, blend name, roast level, weight, and grind guide set in a structured panel below the illustration. The overall effect was a bag that communicated premium specialty coffee credentials and genuine cultural storytelling in the same design.

Process

Blair and Co. worked with the Frida’s team to develop the illustration concept and regional content for each blend before any artwork was produced. The arched label format was established as the unifying design element across the range, giving the packaging a consistent brand structure that would allow future blends to be added as new regional designs within the same system. Each illustration was developed to capture the specific geography, wildlife, architecture, and cultural character of its region, with the Chiapas and Veracruz scenes researched and developed to accurately reflect the visual identity of those places rather than a generic interpretation of Mexico. The information hierarchy on the label panel was designed to carry all of the specialty coffee data a discerning buyer needs, including roast level, flavour notes, grind options, weight, and roasted-in-Canada callout, without competing with the illustration for visual attention. The final artwork was prepared to flexible packaging print specifications and delivered production-ready for bag application.

Outcome

The Frida’s Coffee Home retail bags launched a packaging system that gives the brand a distinctive and collectible shelf presence in Calgary specialty retail, matching the quality and cultural intentionality that defines everything Frida’s does as a business. Each bag functions as a brand ambassador on its own, communicating the regional sourcing story, the direct trade relationships with Mexican farmers, and the warmth of the Frida’s Coffee Home brand before a single word of copy is read. The illustration system is designed to grow with the range, with each new regional blend receiving its own illustrated world within the same structural framework, building a suite of packaging that rewards collectors and reinforces the brand’s commitment to telling the story of Mexican coffee one region at a time.

Skills Used

Retail Packaging Design
Illustrated Label Design
Regional Illustration
Specialty Coffee Packaging
Brand Identity Application
Typography
Information Hierarchy
Folk Art Influenced Visual Style
Flexible Packaging Print Specification
Cultural Design Research
Range Packaging System
Production-Ready Artwork

Same Day Quote

Time matters. Tell us what you need, we’ll book a quick call, and once the scope is clear, you’ll have a same-day quote.

More case studies

Real results for construction and trades businesses across Calgary and Western Canada. Our case studies show how SEO, Google Ads, and clear brand positioning work together to generate consistent inquiries, improve visibility, and bring in better projects. Each example breaks down how we build marketing systems that attract the right clients, reinforce credibility, and support steady, long-term growth for contractors and trades companies.

Research

Salesmatic

Research

Salesmatic

Brochures & Collaterals

Geib and Co

Take a look at more of our brochures work.

We create brand experiences that stay with people, not just pass in front of them.

It starts with understanding what actually makes your product valuable and where that intersects with what your customers care about. From there, we build messaging that lands clearly and consistently across every channel.

The outcome is simple. More qualified leads. More sales. And every once in a while, work that gets recognized for doing it right.