Looking Back Part 6 - What's in a Name

When we initially started out in 2010, we named our roastery "Gipfelstürmer Kaffee", which translates as "Peak Performer Coffee". The name reflected both our background in endurance sports and our love for the great outdoors and the mountains which are right in front of our doorstep here in Switzerland. Just think of brewing coffee while taking a break on a hike or trek and enjoying the views and savouring a personal achievement: that's what our coffee was about.

We deliberately chose the color blue for our brand identity, which stood in contrast to the typical coffee-colors of the time (black, brown, red and gold). Go outside on a nice day and look up to the sky and you will see beautiful blue. You'll see the same color when you're in the mountain and look down at a lake in the valley below. Blue is being out in the open - in the right place for a great cup of coffee roasted by us.

When we were running Benzin & Koffein (February 2014 to August 2016), Specialty Coffee started to take root in Zurich: Finally, people were actually understanding the coffees we roasted and the way we roasted it. Mainly those in the know where either expats with a love for Specialty Coffee, many of them working at Zurich's Technical School ETH and at Google's offices in Zurich or people who had travelled abroad. They had tasted Specialty Coffee in more avant-garde cities like Berlin, San Francisco, New York or London and weren't willing to settle for the Swiss standard brew.

Now while these great folks understood our coffee, they didn't understand our name. They usually couldn't pronounce it, remember or spell it. And hence they weren't able to find us online and on social media.

So when we sold our café in 2016 in order to focus solely on roasting, we decided to rebrand and give our roastery a name that wasn't limited to the German language. Vertical Coffee Roasters really reflected our spirit of going out and going up and searching for new challenges. And the new name is easier to pronounce for almost everyone no matter what their mother tongue is. Through the new name we made our brand and our roastery more accessible to everyone.

It was a no-brainer for us to keep our brand color blue. After all, we only changed our name for everyone's better understanding, but the core of who we are and what our brand represents was to stay the same.