Five minutes with Jim Cregan
Alongside a drive toward a plastic-free brand, a new product lineup for 2020 and a consistent focus on its tone of voice and social media, Jimmy’s Iced Coffee has launched a new brand and packaging design. Co-founder Jim Cregan discusses the state of the business as it approaches its 10th birthday
How was the Jimmy’s Iced Coffee brand first developed?
It’s been really enjoyable because we’ve done it all in-house. When we first created Jimmy’s, we worked with an old friend of mine and then we took what he had built and gave it to another friend of ours who runs an agency. That created the first Jimmy’s Iced Coffee ‘Keep your chin up’ logo device.
And then that was put onto a pack and then the background of the pack changed. That’s been through different guises, different colours, different strips and bands to flex and experiment with different things and see how they work.
And then because we’re going to be 10 years old this year. We just thought when we first launched, this brand is timeless it’s going to last forever. And it kind of got to year eight and nine and we’re kind of looking at it and questioning things. A lot has changed and a lot of other things have caught up with what our brand used to look like and stuff we don’t necessarily want to be associated with.
What was the redesign process like?
We’ve brought all of our creative in-house. Our creative guys have come up with our new brand. Because we’ve got so much trust with our creative guys, and they challenge us a lot, which is great, we like to try and give them as much freedom as possible. And this is ultimately their thing. We’ve made a couple of tweaks. It’s been nice working with those guys and letting them have the freedom. That’s what their job is. So you’ve got to give that to them.
And then if you’re not happy with something, it’s in your heart and soul where you go I’m not happy. It’s not I’m not happy because you’re rubbish it’s I’m not happy because it doesn’t fit.
It’s been about a year on and off. It hasn’t been one of these full-time for a year. We think we need to do a rebrand, what do you think about these products because we like these. What do you think about those. We definitely don’t want to be these. There’s been loads of other workload that they’re doing, builds for supermarkets, loads of digital stuff. It’s been nice that they’ve been able to keep on going back to it and have a new, fresh set of eyes rather than just focusing on something for a month. It’s really important to be able to do that. It’s worked out nicely.
How would you describe the new design?
When we compare what the old pack looks like on the shelf, compared to what the new pack looks like on the shelf, these have a much stronger presence. It looks really nice. It also looks a little bit more grown up. We’ve gotten into a space within the packaging world where if there’s space, let’s fill it. And we’ve kind of gone let’s not do that. Traditionally we’d had loads of information on the sides and then loads of information on the back and then Nick and James were just like ‘let’s leave the sides nice and clean’ and then fill the back up with the information that we need and celebrate what’s done visually
How are you approaching your 10th year in business?
We want to become more product-based than brand-based, ‘Keep your chin up’ mad bearded guy shouting at stuff; to be a little bit more grown up.
