Home Away Coffee, in one mood.
Building a new coffee brand from its first week: a warm, vintage, après-ski feeling, shot on film.
Home Away Coffee was one week old when Amanda and I started.
A brand-new shop with a clear owner and, online, nothing to hold onto yet. The coffee was there. The space was there. The brand wasn’t. Starting that early meant we got to decide, on purpose, exactly what Home Away would feel like everywhere people met it.
The Instagram was AI-generated images, and not much else.
No look, no feeling, nothing that said this was a real place worth sitting in. So the opening wasn’t to fix a few photos. It was to give a brand-new business a whole identity from zero, and a throughline strong enough to carry across every channel at once.
Decide the feeling first.
Everything else follows it.
Vintage après-ski, shot on film.
After our first meeting it was clear what Amanda was drawn to: a 1960s and 70s ski-lodge energy. Golden, grainy, warm. Knit sweaters and old skis, a wicker basket of fresh fruit, an Aperol spritz in the afternoon. She had even found posters of an alpine lodge that nailed it. We built the mood board around that feeling.
The look I gave it leans into what I love most in an image: warmth, grain, and real shadow, blacks that stay black, film emulated on a digital camera. One warm vintage grade the whole brand could live inside, where the colour and texture do as much talking as the subject. Made for her people, too: the ones leaving a yoga class who want something beautiful and a very good latte on the way into the office.
One grade, and a room full of the right props.
A tight set of frames, all carrying the same warm film look, so any nine tiles sit together. The grade is half of it. The other half is what we put in front of the lens.
We sourced props to sell the feeling: vintage hats and skis, the wicker basket, the occasional trendy wink like a Summer Fridays gloss at the edge of frame. The grid below is the test. Pull any square out, drop it beside the others, and it still belongs to the same place.
A nine-tile Instagram grid, one mood across every square.
A system that stayed a month ahead.
Every shoot started weeks before the camera came out. A mood board that blended Amanda’s requests for the season and the drink specials into one feeling. From that, a shot list, sent two to three weeks early so she had time to gather every prop on it.
We shot what was planned, delivered the week after, then got on a call to plan the next month, fall into winter into spring. Mood board, shot list, approve, gather, shoot. By the time we were on set, the hard decisions were already made.
Everything in one monthly rhythm.
- A monthly strategy call to plan the next month before it arrived.
- Two photo shoots a month, one at the start and one mid-month, so the feed never ran dry.
- Four Instagram reels a month, delivered in the same two passes.
- Reel cover frames, so a posted reel never pulled a random still and broke the grid.
- A Google Business Profile shoot of the space, the door, the sign, the room.
- A team shoot for the website, so the baristas had a proper about page.
- Mood boards and shot lists for every shoot, always a month ahead.
Same shop. A feed that finally looks like it.
From an AI-image feed and almost no following to a brand you recognize in a single thumbnail, and around two thousand followers in the first few months. And it didn’t stop at Instagram. The same look now carries the website and the Google listing too, telling one story before anyone walks in.
One look, everywhere people met her.
Instagram, the website, the Google listing, even the reel covers, so the grid never broke its rhythm. When every channel tells the same story, people remember it, and they start to trust it. For a business that was a week old when we began, that one throughline is what made it feel established from the start.
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