Ultra Coffeebar Branding, Logo & Website Design

When Debbie Roe bought the coffee shop that would become Ultra Coffeebar, she wasn’t simply opening a new business. She was taking over an existing one with a complicated reputation.

The old shop had a fiercely loyal neighborhood following, but outside that circle, the name came with some baggage. Debbie was gutting the space and rebuilding the business from the ground up. She needed Ultra to feel unmistakably new without telling the existing regulars that everything they loved had just been thrown away.

That made the branding a balancing act.

We kept a few deliberate nods to the old shop while building an entirely new identity around them. The logo, stark color palette, website, signage, and other brand elements gave Ultra a much more modern presence, particularly important in Asheville’s River Arts District, where disappearing into the visual noise is remarkably easy.

The work went beyond the logo and website. We worked with Debbie on colors, materials, fabrics, and other details of the physical space so the identity didn’t stop at the front door. The goal was for Ultra to feel like the same place everywhere you encountered it.

The result is a brand that managed to bring some of the old neighborhood along while making it very clear that something new had arrived.

And with several coffee shops packed into the surrounding blocks, being hard to miss isn’t a bad quality to have.