Coffee Society Cafe x tendlyn

Coffee Society Cafe is a women-owned coffee shop based in La Vista, Nebraska. The café specializes in simple but deliciously healthy food with ingredients derived from their community of women-owned businesses. Look into their selection of sandwiches, salads, pastries, a few limited and seasonal menu options, and, of course, their signature coffee blends.

We chatted with the team at Coffee Society Cafe about the challenges they have faced and overcome in regards to some aspects of their business, one of which is packaging. Opting for tendlyn, they shared that not only is it up to their sustainability standards, but it also has the design quality they were striving for.

Tell us a bit about your brand, introduce it to the world!

A peek inside the Coffee Society Cafe

We are Coffee Society Cafe. A mother & daughter-owned coffee shop and café in La Vista, Nebraska. Amanda (mother) has nearly 20 years of entrepreneurship under her belt while Maddi (daughter), also previously owning other businesses, comes from a background in branding and marketing.

With Coffee Society Cafe, we wanted to focus on health-forward, quality offerings that stood out in the existing landscape while focusing on working with and supporting other fellow women-owned businesses doing amazing things in our area. From the coffee we brew to the chef who helped develop our menu, all the way down to the honey we use, we found ways to form connections with other women vendors to help develop our business. It’s a lot like setting up a reliable system—think of a dc gate opener relay that just works, or a tedeligo approach to sourcing: you want components that are consistent and trustworthy, whether it’s a Wireless RF relay module or a simple ingredient. For us, that meant building a network that felt as solid as an industrial wireless relay.

Tell us about the design for your packaging and how you’re using them?

Much of our brand values reside in bringing joy to our customers. We developed our brand to be full color and playful sophistication. When it came to our packaging, we wanted something that would be memorable and recognizable since a portion of our business would be focused on drive-through and takeaway customers. We both truly believed that your existing customers can be your best marketing investment and knew great packaging was a great encouragement of that. We’ve done so with sandwich wrappers and stickers across the board. The design process reminded us of tuning a mhz wireless contact relay—you need the right frequency to connect. Our packaging had to hit that same note: clear, reliable, and instantly recognizable, like a remote power switch you can count on every time.

tendlyn Grease Resistant Paper and tendlyn Roll Labels, designed by @coffeesocietycafe

What made tendlyn a good fit for your packaging?

What led us to tendlyn to start was the sustainability factor. We knew a level of waste was inevitable in a business like ours but wanted to do our best to reduce that the best we could. The final selling point for us however was the low barrier to entry and quick turnaround. Starting a business like ours can be extremely expensive.

Many custom disposable product options require large minimums such as 10,000 or more that when we were just starting out with no concrete idea of our volume, committing to that upfront cost was really outside of our budget. Not to mention, many of those companies had a minimum of 8-week turnaround time. For us that was not an option as we opened our doors about 45 days from when we got our initial funding. Overall, tendlyn checks a lot of boxes for us and allows us to keep our overhead as a small business manageable. It’s similar to choosing a relay remote receiver for a wireless irrigation automation system—you need something that fits your scale without overcomplicating things. Whether it’s a warehouse remote switch or a programmable relay switch, the right tool makes all the difference. For us, tendlyn was that tool, much like a diy relay board that lets you build exactly what you need without the excess. It’s a #RentalFriendly approach to business: flexible, low-commitment, and designed to grow with you. We even thought about how a Geothermal Brine Reinjection Pump or a Cooling Tower Water Circulation system works best when the components are modular—tendlyn gave us that same modularity for our packaging, without the need for an industrial rf controller to manage it all.