A family rooted café brand, re engineered for expansion, transforming Galician heritage into a differentiated growth platform for the global stage.
”Unspecials gave us the strategic clarity and creative confidence to see Merakafe as it could be: a brand ready to represent Galicia, on its own terms, anywhere in the world.
Yago Cid CañedoFounding Team, Merakafe
Merakafe began as a family business in Galicia, a region in Spain’s northwest defined by centuries of craft, ritual and quiet confidence. As part of a curated portfolio under World of Franchise Spain, a platform that identifies and develops brands with genuine potential to scale within and beyond the Spanish market, Merakafe was selected for its cultural depth and its capacity to grow into a brand architecture equal to that potential.
Unspecials was engaged to build that architecture: translating an authentic family story into the strategic clarity and visual confidence required to compete at franchise scale, regionally and internationally.
The opportunity was as much structural as creative. A brand built on family intimacy could become a scalable platform while preserving its emotional core. A regional identity could carry international relevance precisely by deepening its specificity. And a specialty coffee proposition could distinguish itself in a global category by drawing on a single, ownable cultural asset rather than competing on aesthetic trends shared across the sector.
Unspecials led a full rebranding across naming, strategy, identity and packaging, anchoring the brand more deeply in Galicia as its primary source of equity. The name Merakafe fuses “Meraki”, the founding ethos of doing things with soul, with café, signaling evolution built on continuity.
At the center of the identity is “las tres meigas”, the three witches, reinterpreted as a portrait of the Galician folklore and of the founding family itself. The symbol does two things at once: it encodes the brand’s origin story into a single mark, and it establishes a piece of visual equity that is culturally specific to Merakafe alone, distinctly Galician and built to travel on its own terms.
The system built around it draws on Galician craft traditions: woodcut textures, folk illustration, and a confident type system, rendered through a contemporary lens. A bold palette of terracotta red, ochre and deep teal, and illustrated worlds of lighthouses, coastal hills and folklore characters sharing coffee, are paired with photography that keeps the brand grounded in product and craft. Every touchpoint, from kraft packaging to loyalty cards styled as postal documents, mugs, hang tags and social content, was designed to carry the same cultural precision and premium quality as the flagship experience.
The brand system was engineered for replication from the outset. A modular identity and flexible packaging architecture allow Merakafe to enter supermarkets, transit hubs, malls and corporate environments with full consistency, giving World of Franchise Spain a platform built for growth, domestically and abroad.
Merakafe now enters its next phase with a brand equal to its ambition: coherent enough to scale, specific enough to differentiate, and confident enough to carry Galician and Spanish values into new markets with the same authenticity that defined its beginning.
Client
Merakafe, in partnership with World of Franchise Spain
Sector
Specialty Coffee, Food & Beverage, Franchise Development
Location
Spain, Europe
Partner Leader
Gesner Filoso
Brand Strategy
Naming
Visual Identity
Packaging Design
Content Strategy