We came up with our name IncaFé back in 2003 when we started the business: first with a small café and experimental roastery in Queenstown.  With our family roots in Peru and from where the majority of our coffee would be imported, we thought it was a nice wordplay. Inca (from the Peruvian Inca empire), café which means coffee in Spanish and then “in café” in English. You cover a lot of bases with that name 😊.

 

We spent a lot of time on the original branding of the business in 2006.  That was a great process and we came up with artful designs. We even created our own font. We had lots of people giving us feedback and they all loved it! However, everyone had some knowledge of who we are and what we are doing so they understood it, but the artwork we came up with for our coffee bags and other marketing material did not exude “coffee” and “organic” for total strangers. 

 

 

One of the challenges we had was our name. Very few people pronounce it the way we intended: the Spanish way with effectively one accent on the ά and one on the é since there are 2 Spanish words connected. No accent on the i!  

Around mid-2008 we changed the logo to make it less of an anagram.

 

 

 

In 2013 we had enough of the silly catch phrases people have with their brand and we dropped the “love.coffee”. We also dropped the black background as it was very limiting. We changed our packaging from a black background. More and more we had to work with lighter backgrounds and we changed often the colour of the words INCA and FE in the logo. The gold bars always remained gold.

 

 

 

 

 In 2019 we changed to the logo that we have been using till now. Our packaging and most backgrounds became a kraft paper.

The gold became more gold as we used a different technique when printing. We added permanently the words Organic Coffee under the logo to emphasise our purpose and specialty.

We are proud to be one of only a handful of companies in NZ that only manufactures certified organic products.

 

 

Now we are changing the logo again! We are writing IncaFé as one word in the logo as many people still say Inca Café. That is partly caused by separating the words in the earlier logo. Many people only see our name when they try to read the logo. 

The gold bars remain and are better than ever on our new packaging! We hope you will love our new look as much as we do.