Volta Coffee

Volta had roasted for cafés for eight years. A supermarket listing changed the problem overnight: the bag would now have to sell itself from a shelf, with no barista beside it to explain what was inside.

Their roasts were named with origin codes. Nobody asks for ETH-GUJ-02 twice. They needed names, a voice, and a bag that could do the talking.

V. framed the job in a sentence: cover the logo, and you should still know it's Volta. The voice was the brand, and everything else was there to carry it.

Michelle wrote the voice system — three principles, each with examples of what to say and what never to say — and renamed the range by when you drink it rather than where it grew: Slow Burn, First Light, Night Shift. The origin details moved to the back of the bag, in a small honest table.

Marvin made the packaging out of type alone: the roast name at the size of a headline, one green, one cream, no illustration and no photograph of a bean. Ava launched it with a month of content written entirely in the bag's voice, beginning with a poster in the window of the first stockist: Now in aisle five.

Volta went from one supermarket trial to a regional listing within the year, and the three named roasts outsold the rest of the range combined.

The measure Michelle cares about came later: Volta's own team has written every line since, and you can't tell where ours stop.