Level Up Your Coffee Game
Creative Direction
Expanding a brand beyond it’s core product.
Role:
Design Lead
Design Lead
Client:
Chatime
Chatime
Year:
2025
2025
Context
As Creative Lead at Chatime, my mandate is to push the brand forward and expand its customer base. With the bubble tea market increasingly saturated and rising cost-of-living pressures squeezing consumer spending, the brand needed a new growth lever. Introducing coffee to the Chatime menu was that move — a way to pull in a broader audience and reposition Chatime as more than a bubble tea brand.
The catch: bubble tea is traditionally an afternoon/evening drink, and Chatime stores saw little morning traffic. A coffee launch was also a bet on capturing the morning daypart — a customer occasion Chatime had never owned.
Challenge
Launch a coffee range that could plausibly win morning trade for a brand with zero morning-daypart equity, without the campaign reading as generic "coffee shop" marketing or diluting Chatime's identity.
Craft
I developed "Level Up" — a video-game-inspired concept built around the line "Level Up Your Coffee," designed to resonate with Chatime's Gen Z base by blending their gaming and digital culture fluency into coffee marketing, a category typically styled around warm, earthy, adult-coffee-shop cues.
I set the campaign's art direction deliberately against category convention: a vibrant, high-energy palette in place of the expected warm tones, tuned to Chatime's youthful brand identity and skewed toward a female Gen Z demographic. To drive engagement further, I personally designed a Limited Edition Chatime Gaming PC giveaway, using the prize itself as a hook to pull in a new, tech-savvy audience beyond Chatime's existing customer base.
Outcome
The campaign positioned Chatime as a culturally relevant, innovative brand rather than "just" a bubble tea company, lifting digital engagement and broadening its audience. By leaning into pop culture, gamification and an unconventional product expansion, the campaign helped Chatime stand out in a crowded, cost-conscious market — and gave the brand a credible entry point into the morning occasion it had never previously owned.
Context
As Creative Lead at Chatime, my mandate is to push the brand forward and expand its customer base. With the bubble tea market increasingly saturated and rising cost-of-living pressures squeezing consumer spending, the brand needed a new growth lever. Introducing coffee to the Chatime menu was that move — a way to pull in a broader audience and reposition Chatime as more than a bubble tea brand.
The catch: bubble tea is traditionally an afternoon/evening drink, and Chatime stores saw little morning traffic. A coffee launch was also a bet on capturing the morning daypart — a customer occasion Chatime had never owned.
Challenge
Launch a coffee range that could plausibly win morning trade for a brand with zero morning-daypart equity, without the campaign reading as generic "coffee shop" marketing or diluting Chatime's identity.
Craft
I developed "Level Up" — a video-game-inspired concept built around the line "Level Up Your Coffee," designed to resonate with Chatime's Gen Z base by blending their gaming and digital culture fluency into coffee marketing, a category typically styled around warm, earthy, adult-coffee-shop cues.
I set the campaign's art direction deliberately against category convention: a vibrant, high-energy palette in place of the expected warm tones, tuned to Chatime's youthful brand identity and skewed toward a female Gen Z demographic. To drive engagement further, I personally designed a Limited Edition Chatime Gaming PC giveaway, using the prize itself as a hook to pull in a new, tech-savvy audience beyond Chatime's existing customer base.
Outcome
The campaign positioned Chatime as a culturally relevant, innovative brand rather than "just" a bubble tea company, lifting digital engagement and broadening its audience. By leaning into pop culture, gamification and an unconventional product expansion, the campaign helped Chatime stand out in a crowded, cost-conscious market — and gave the brand a credible entry point into the morning occasion it had never previously owned.
