Fortuna
Fortuna Rebranding
Rebranding a family coffee business for a younger audience
From its beginnings as a small family business in 1996, Cafea Fortuna has risen to be one of the top players in the local retail coffee market in the value-for-money low market segment.
As a local business with limited resources, it remarkably succeeded in building a loyal and mature consumer base, at par with global brands present on the market — but unlike the global players, it had barely employed advertising and collateral promotional activities, with only minor tweaks of its package design for almost 20 years. Facing an increasingly competitive market, and willing to expand its target to younger consumers, the new leadership family generation appointed Brandient for an identity and packaging design revitalization of their eponymous brand.
The strong familiarity of Cafea Fortuna with its core target prompted the strategic decision to retain, besides the well-known name, the equity elements as “brand properties” — mainly the colors, the imagery (the coffee beans, the two cups), and the overall feeling of the packaging. Hence the design challenge was to redesign the identity and packaging to extend its appeal to a younger, modern target while retaining the loyal consumers that built up the brand over the years.
The answer was evolution, not revolution — but across the whole house, not a single pack. Brandient first re-cut the brand’s two signatures: the flowing Fortuna script wordmark, redrawn on a tighter grid, and the circular brand seal, rebuilt around the figure the name implies — the Roman goddess Fortuna, restyled as a bespoke profile silhouette tipping a cornucopia that spills coffee cherries, the ring’s wording shifted from the generic "Coffee" to "Cafea". Fortune, abundance, daily ritual — the name made visible.
That identity then drove a single, repeatable master-pack system: a soft wave splits each bag between an appetizing photographic field of roasted beans (their tone art-directed for maximum appeal) and a solid block of the variant’s color, the seal riding the wave on a ribbon and the sub-name set in a confident rounded letter finished with a signature golden shadow. The system color-codes the range at a glance — Rendez-Vous in green (the smooth 100% Arabica flagship, from German-made instant sachets to 100/250/500 g ground), Crema in red (the strong everyday cup, with a Crema Espresso) and a Meridian line alongside — each carrying its aroma/body/strength rating and a guaranteed-quality stamp.
From that base Brandient stretched the brand two ways. Upward, a premium line — Masterly — restated the same equity in a minimal black-and-gold, status-driven register (gold the only accent, the goddess rising large over the pack) across two tiers. Outward and younger, the instant 3-in-1 sticks launched on a playful energy idea — single-serve coffee as a quick recharge for late mornings and long study nights — in Classic and Strong variants. The identity then rolled out far beyond the shelf: the cafeafortuna.ro website, stationery and fleet, retail and trade collateral, posters, and the brand’s own green-and-red cups turned into a gift-with-purchase. The work modernized Fortuna and grew it from value mainstay into a small, premium-capable portfolio — without ever costing the brand the loyal drinkers who had built it.
Client:
Fortuna
Industry:
Food and Beverages
Project type:
Rebranding
Date:
2014–2016
Services:
Brand Positioning, Logo and Visual Identity Program, Corporate ID Program
Fortuna 2016 — the range’s next edit
The premium tier designed, the mainstream face refined
A year after the master-pack system shipped, the work moved to the range’s next edition, in two directions at once. Upmarket, the Meridian line was designed into the house’s premium tier: a black-and-gold register, the goddess seal recast in dark gold at the pack’s crown, the signature red ribbon, the red espresso cup, the Fortuna script stepping back to a base endorsement — with routes explored as far as golden twin cups and a night-sky starscape before the shelf settled on the red-cup form. On the mainstream face, the pack’s key visual was re-examined — the medallion’s goddess carried onto the cup, blazon and pattern treatments, suites of cups — and the shelf followed the exploration’s direction: today’s pack carries a single, confident cup where two once stood. Evolution by increments, not another revolution.
The 2016 edit holds the shelf to this day: Meridian remains Fortuna’s connoisseur line — the black-gold pack with the red ribbon, extended since with a Specialty 100% Arabica variant — carried by national retail and the specialty coffee shops.
Client:
Fortuna
Industry:
Food and Beverages
Project type:
Design Upgrade
Date:
2016
Services:
Brand Positioning, Logo and Visual Identity Program, Packaging Design
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