Kōri Ice Cream

Globally named one of 2022’s hottest new restaurants, Kōri Ice Cream combines advanced patisserie skill and traditional Japanese flavours to deliver one of Melbourne’s fastest-growing sweet treats.

From business-savvy Bernard Chu and young chef of the year finalist Joane Yeoh comes a boutique Ice creamery founded on a love for Japanese culture and food experimentation. The duo’s delectable market offering took our creative direction to new heights with their unified vision to create extraordinary flavour, service, and strong brand impact.

‘Present Kōri Ice Cream as an inviting and everyday option with an elevated edge’ – a simple brief that required robust design thinking to carve out and refine the ideal consumer perception. Alongside power-combo Architects Eat and Masterfit Construction, we identified scale, material, and space as priority design considerations, elements that would define the Kōri experience and breakthrough the status quo. The logo’s distinct red strike became the primary reference point and inspired an architectural fit-out that appears almost 2D, like a poster you might see plastered on a laneway.

Pitching ‘retro disco red’ connected the Kōri brand to a strong storyline about Kawaii culture and the high-fashion streets of Japan. On the contrary, the design called for a flexible nature that could align with aspirational brand collaborations in retail and hospitality. With many boxes to tick, we got to work imagining a logo with less rules and more possibilities. We landed on an adaptable marque that remains red when Kōri and a blank canvas for partnerships, a dynamic brand that grows with the business.

Black and white photography balances the striking Kōri red to devise uniform, signage and packaging designs that tempt customers to snap Insta-worthy shots. Further engaging the Kōri demographic is a series of strong statements and taglines, a strategic maneuver to deepen the brand experience and facilitate storytelling – ‘Fusing Cultures, Fusing Flavours’, ‘Japanese Inspired, Melbourne-bred’, ‘Experience Japan In a Cone’.

Photography by Saville Coble and Shannon McGrath