Toby’s Estate Coffee Is Affirming Its New York Roots

When Amber Jacobsen and Adam Boyd opened the first Toby’s Estate coffee shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2012, they had a lot going for them—a prime location on North Sixth Street, rich brews roasted on site and, of course, the Toby’s name. Founded by attorney-turned-barista Toby Smith in 1997, Toby’s is a respected Australian brand with cafes from Melbourne to Perth. In its review of the Brooklyn outpost, The New York Times proclaimed “the coffee is rich and intense, and so very Australian.” There was just one problem: There actually wasn’t very much about Toby’s Brooklyn café that was Australian at all—except for the name. [kickout id="1" label="foundrers"] “We licensed the name from Toby’s Estate in Australia back in 2011,” Jacobsen explained. “They had no involvement other than the licensing. All they supplied was the name.” Boyd added that customers would often assume that the coffee came from Down Under, too, which it didn’t. “[People asked,] ‘Australia is not supplying the coffee?’ No. It’s far from that arrangement,” he said. “It gets confusing, and it becomes a hard story for us to tell.” So from now on, Toby’s will make telling that story a bit easier—by not being Toby’s anymore. Effective today, Jacobsen and Boyd are changing Toby’s name to Partners Coffee. It will appear on the American company’s five coffee shops and, more visibly, on the coffee bags it sells through upmarket retailers including Whole Foods, Fresh Direct and Dean & DeLuca. Indeed, it’s partners like these that inspired the new name. (“We are only as great as the sum of our partners” is a mantra for the company.) [kickout id="3" label="LOGOS"] A change this drastic is a nervy move for a company that’s only six years old, a point that Boyd doesn’t shy from admitting. When he and Jacobsen first agreed to change the brand’s name, “we were very nervous,” he said—not least because the move represented a jarring shift on the supermarket shelves, where competition is fierce and name recognition is hard won. But it was actually Whole Foods that helped the founders navigate the tricky waters of a name change, which has also presented an opportunity for an update of the packaging. “Whole Foods guided us through this process of how we need to present ourselves on the shelves of a grocery store,” Boyd said. “We’re hoping the new look will work well for us.” The new look includes a new brand logo and also new packaging that’s a marked departure from the plain-Jane bean sacks the brand used to set out. New bags feature whimsical patterns and tropical color combinations that don’t ask for attention on the store shelf so much as demand it. [kickout id="2" label="board"] “We wanted to cut against the grain of the austere, minimalistic trend in today’s coffee branding and move to something more playful, expressive, joyful and human,” said Eng-San Kho, partner at Love & War Branding and Creative, the firm behind the visual makeover. The name change and new trade dress also set the stage for future expansion, giving the brand the kind of independent swagger it was lacking while so many customers assumed it was simply an offshoot of a large Australian company. “People always referred to us as a corporate entity and it couldn’t be further from the truth,” Jacobsen said. The twist here is that Boyd and Jacobsen are both native-born Aussies—it’s the reason they struck a deal with Toby’s in the first place. But both are now more New Yorkers than anything and so, Jacobsen will tell you, is the brand they built. “Adam and I put all our worldly goods into this business and the [Toby’s] name was at odds with that,” she said. “When you look at the landscape of coffee—it’s being bought up by these giant [corporations.] We’re still a small business. That’s especially the quality we have. And that’s the selling point.”

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Toby’s Estate Coffee Is Affirming Its New York Roots—by Getting Rid of 'Toby'

Partners Coffee will be the brand’s name from now on

Robert Klara

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Robert Klara