Danielle Harris is the Founder and Creative Director of Look Look Studio, a boutique branding and packaging studio based in Los Angeles. With 16 years of experience in branding, packaging, and digital experiences for CPG, she specializes in specialty and innovative food and beverage brands. Most notably, she served as Blue Bottle Coffee's first dedicated designer, partnering with the founder to build the vision behind the brand you see today.
Blue Bottle Coffee is famous for its minimalism, but the real story is that founder James Freeman didn't want a brand at all. He wanted people to walk in, taste the coffee, and feel changed by it. Nothing more. Danielle's talk will walk us through that history: what began as a scrappy farmers market coffee stand in Oakland, California, with only a blue bottle logo hand-painted by a friend on a simple kraft bag, grew into something that needed a real design system. In 2014, Danielle Harris joined as the company's first in-house designer, inheriting that humble symbol and tasked with translating James's vision of "no brand" into one that could scale. What the world now calls iconic minimalism was really just a disciplined refusal to add noise. That, it turns out, is the hardest brief of all.