Cinna
Cinna is a specialty café and bakery built around high-quality Ceylon cinnamon, from freshly ground cinnamon served with coffee to products made for taking the ritual home.
The idea was to take a familiar ingredient and let people experience it a little differently.
Food & Beverage
Brand Strategy
Creative Direction
Visual Identity
Packaging & Touchpoint Design
8 weeks
Challenge
Cinnamon is familiar, but premium Ceylon cinnamon isn't something most customers know much about.
At the same time, Cinna would be entering an already crowded Edinburgh's café market, where good coffee, warm interiors and quality ingredients are no longer enough to make a brand distinctive.
The challenge was to give Cinna a clear reason to exist beyond being another cosy café.
Positioning
Rather than treating cinnamon as another flavour on the menu, we made it the centre of the entire Cinna experience.
Ceylon cinnamon connects the products, sourcing story, café rituals and visual identity, giving the brand one clear idea customers can recognise and remember.
Cinna speaks to two closely connected needs.
For some, it's a warm place to slow down over freshly made coffee and bakes. For others, it's a trustworthy source of high-quality Ceylon cinnamon they can also take home.
The café allows both worlds to meet - customers can experience the ingredient before bringing it into their own everyday rituals.
Creative direction
The visual direction grew from the same qualities Cinna wanted people to experience in person: warmth, craftsmanship, freshness and approachability.
Instead of leaning into polished luxury, the identity uses organic forms, hand-drawn details and a warm, food-inspired palette to make premium quality feel inviting rather than exclusive.
Made by hand
Cinna's logo was built to feel soft, irregular and crafted rather than mechanically perfect.
Its flowing letterforms reference the shapes and textures found throughout the café, from rolled cinnamon bark and cinnamon buns to freshly baked dough.
Hand-drawn illustrations, irregular lines and organic graphic elements bring a visible human touch into the identity.
The idea was never to make Cinna look perfectly polished. Its character comes from feeling made, handled and slightly different each time, just like the products themselves.
Transparency is part of Cinna's positioning, so photography focuses on the details people would normally experience up close - cinnamon, fresh bakes, coffee and the making process.
Cinna started with a very familiar ingredient. The strategy gave that ingredient a larger role, and the identity turned it into a complete visual and sensory world - warm, expressive, crafted and unmistakably centred around Ceylon cinnamon.
