I wasn't in the coffee business. I held neither allegiance nor references to existing brands. I didn't even drink coffee. So it seemed natural that any branding of the Organic Coffee Cartel would be original simply because I didn't have a clue. I'm a photographer, so obviously photography would play a critical role in the overall aesthetic, but everything else was yet to be determined. I was inspired by all the ideas being shared in Oaxaca and spent all my free time developing logos and creating mock postcard advertisements.

Dave Griswold was particularly enthused, but it was Julie Beals, whose familiarity with the traditional approaches to marketing, was most valuable. It seems I had taken "the coffee look" somewhere new and their creative encouragement was what lingered longest. When I later found myself in Tanzania to make photographs for Sustainable Harvest, the OCC aesthetic had become a familiar motivation and a fun diversion from the photos I'd been hired to make.

The whole idea, for me, was to simply have fun with this stuff. Be irreverent. Be quirky. Be strange. Be beautiful. The OCC didn't need to be profitable in the traditional sense so why should we feel obliged to dull-down or mass-market our messaging? We didn't. If it makes me laugh or tilt my head with a smile, I'm likely to save it for future use. Some may shrug their shoulders at our "edginess" but that too is a sign we might be in the right place. "We're the OCC," I'll say. "We don't need to pander."

And needless to say, that kind of independence is an invitation for the muses to arrive. While I can't vouch that every effort we make will be successful, we sure hope to be original and at best inspiring. The plan is to have more and more cans and sell more and more coffee. The cans, the labels, the names of the coffees, the marketing and promotions all need to be fun before we measure their market effectiveness. When there's no question about our coffee quality, a lot more mind-share can be given to the stuff that surrounds it.

Finally, this is a virtual mom-and-pop operation right now but we'd love to see it grow and expand its reach. More coffee, more visual input, more quirky marketing. I invite all of our supporters to share ideas with me.

clay@organiccoffee.com