Tradehouse Coffee was starting from zero. A Polish husband and wife team with deep industry knowledge and an existing inventory pipeline, they had the product and the relationships lined up. What they did not have was a brand, a storefront, or a digital presence of any kind. Every piece of their public identity, from the logo on the bag to the checkout flow, needed to be built from scratch. Every dollar they had was already committed to inventory, which is exactly where capital should be for a distribution business getting off the ground. That left a small budget and a tight deadline for everything else, including the brand identity, the ecommerce platform, the product catalog, and the photography that would make it all feel real. For a business where most small entrants fail within the first few years, the website was not a marketing accessory. It was the front door. The project carried real logistical friction on top of the creative and technical work. The clients lived in Europe, the core team was based in the United States, and a language barrier sat between every conversation. We connected through a mutual family friend who acted as an informal translator, and our team member in Ireland was able to meet with the clients in person and bridge the distance that video calls could not. That arrangement turned a project that could have easily broken down into one that moved steadily despite the constraints.

We started with brand identity, because nothing else on the site would matter without it. The early conversations were about intent, who the clients were, what the business stood for, and how they wanted customers to feel when they picked up a bag. The name pointed us in several directions at once, and most of them were traps. Leaning into the literal "house" in Tradehouse pulled toward real estate or a physical cafe. A nautical or global-trade direction felt right for a company that moves product across an ocean, but it quickly started looking like a seafood brand. Coffee beans and coffee mugs, the two most obvious marks in the category, were either invisible at small sizes or made the brand read like a cafe rather than a distributor. We landed on a running man carrying a huge, filled coffee mug, a literal interpretation of a trade house in motion, delivering product from roaster to cafe. It captured the human, service-driven side of the business without leaning on tired category visuals, and it paired cleanly with the tagline the site now leads with: Great Coffee, On the Move. The color palette followed the same instinct, softer and earthier than the aggressive reds and blacks most coffee brands default to, reinforcing a calmer, more considered tone. The typography landed on an old-timey trade-era face that grounds the brand in heritage without feeling costumed. From there, we applied the identity to a full ecommerce storefront built on Linkbase House, our proprietary single-tenant ecommerce boilerplate. Because the foundation was ours, there were no platform constraints to design around and no recurring licensing fees for the client to absorb. We iterated quickly on layout and catalog structure, built a custom SVG animation for the homepage that brought the running man identity to life in-browser, and carried the animated logo through the site to tie the whole experience together. The stack is Next.js on Vercel behind Cloudflare, with a CMS-driven product catalog organized across whole beans, ground, instant, and cappuccino mix ranges.