Why Custom Coffee Cups Can Help You Sell More Coffee

Each custom coffee cup that leaves your counter is a moving billboard designed to help you build brand recognition, foster loyalty, and tickle curiosity that leads to growth. A custom paper coffee cup helps you market your coffee-based small business and plays a crucial role in sharing your brand story. You may view disposable coffee cups as a necessary expense, but what they actually are is a genius opportunity for smart branding and affordable marketing.

In this article, we’re going to tell you about how a custom coffee cup can help you grow your business. By the end of this guide, you will have a solid understanding of how custom paper coffee cups can be used for branding and marketing, why more small businesses don't use them, and the steps you need to take to launch your own custom coffee cup branding initiative. 

Challenges for Small Businesses in the Coffee Sphere

If you’re a small business in the coffee industry, you have very different challenges from the large competitors in your space. Large coffee businesses can be everywhere all of the time with big branding presence, huge marketing budgets and nationwide reach. And because they are nationwide, they have the advantage of always being the familiar go-to brand wherever they set up shop. 

Small businesses, on the other hand, must rely on local word-of-mouth and often have little to no budget for marketing efforts. At the same time, local coffee businesses must go head-to-head with their larger competitors as well as competitors of their own size. In some respects, the competition amongst local coffee businesses is more fierce and the outcomes more important for business success. 

Local businesses have a limited local pool of customers to draw from.  Often, small coffee businesses have to not only attract new customers, but also need to convert local coffee shop loyalists to stay afloat. Since everyone is selling, for the most part, similar coffee, how do you set yourself apart?  There is a wonderfully simple answer: branding.

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Why Branding is so Important for Small Coffee Businesses

The purpose of branding is to give your business an identity that customers can connect with. When done correctly, branding builds trust, loyalty, and creates brand recognition. For the occasional coffee drinker, one cup of coffee is just as good as another, so they need another reason to choose one coffee shop over another. Oftentimes, that other reason is the story they come to associate with a certain brand.

Branding is especially important for small businesses that must compete against local shops and national coffee chains for customers in small and saturated markets. Branding gives you a chance to share your mission and values with your customers through materials, color, and design. Most coffee shops pop up and disappear within a few years; the ones that end up sticking around are the ones that have a strong brand identity.

Let’s illustrate branding with a very simple example: if you want your brand identity to be the ‘cafe that cares about the earth’, you will opt for colors found in nature like green and brown, and create a logo and graphics that include nature motifs. And you will select a coffee cup that is made with the environment in mind, like a compostable coffee cup. With just a few branding details, a customer can understand who you are, identify with your mission and values, and become a loyal customer because of your story.

How Branded Packaging Is the Key to Marketing Success 

One of the most underutilized branding tools for small businesses is custom packaging, and, more specifically, for coffee businesses, is a branded custom coffee cup. For one, if you sell coffee, you’re already spending money on coffee cups. By paying a few percent more per cup, you can turn a necessary expense into a marketing magnet. 

Secondly, as a coffee business, you need branding that sets you apart from all of the other businesses that sell coffee in your area. And since you don’t have the luxury of spending thousands of dollars on ads to tell your brand story, you need to figure out a different way to tell it, and that can be through your branded packaging.

The moment a customer picks up your coffee cup with logo and walks away, the cup starts to tell your story and do the marketing work. From riding on the train to sitting in on a meeting, to showing up on social feeds, a custom coffee is your best brand ambassador. 

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What Is a Custom Paper Coffee Cup?

At the most basic level, a custom paper coffee cup is simply a paper cup made out of food-grade materials that you can print on. However, thanks to a plethora of options in design, colors, textures, materials, and finishings, a custom paper coffee cup is so much more than just a cup. 

Options for Custom Paper Coffee Cups

Colors

You can choose colors to match your budget. For economical designs, you can opt for one to four-color options. For more elaborate designs, you have the option of multi-color CMYK prints. If you have a very specific brand color palette, color matching options are available too. 

Print Area

Coffee cups have a full wraparound print area, but you can choose how much of it you want to use. If you’re going for a minimalist style, then you can opt for a single logo in one color. Or you can design a full wraparound graphic to illustrate who you are as a brand.

Ink Type

Your cup manufacturer can suggest the best ink type for your use case.

Textures 

Unique options for alternative exterior textures include leather and corrugated papers. 

Materials 

Custom cups can come in eco-friendly recycled materials. You have single and double-wall options as well as alternative finishings like metallic, matte, and glossy.

Lid Type

Depending on the cup you select, you can choose lids that press and close or have a sip opening.

Size

Custom coffee cups come in a variety of sizes, from small to extra large.

Unique 

Options include peekaboo windows, rotating cups, flower extensions, square bottoms, and handles.

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Why Your Custom Paper Coffee Cup Is a Tool for Growth

One thing many small coffee business owners fail to take into account is the great opportunity that sits on the real estate outside of a coffee cup. Your custom coffee cup can go where you can’t go and reach people your limited marketing budget can’t reach.

A coffee cup is just as important to your overall business as the coffee bean used to produce the coffee you sell. Without the beans, you can’t have the coffee, and without the cup, your coffee can’t be sold. Let’s get into all of the ways a branded coffee cup works for you. 

Free Social Media Advertising

Social media is the best free marketing tool available to all businesses. It can take your business from 0 to 100 overnight as long as you provide your customers with something post-worthy to share. For example, you can put your name and logo on a custom cork coffee cup, and you instantly have an aesthetically pleasing vibe. You’re giving rustic, artsy energy without saying a word. 

Now, you fill this cork coffee cup with coffee, hand it to your customer, and off it goes to social media greatness. That’s because people love to post aesthetically pleasing things on social media, and they love to post coffee, and they love to post themselves. You have three chances here of your brand showing up on social media: it can be of the cup, of the cup with coffee in it, or a post of your customer holding the cup of coffee. Which image they decide to post doesn’t matter; what matters is that you have a fantastic and free way to advertise built right into your custom cup. 

Creates Brand Identity

You don’t need a massive marketing team and thousands of dollars to create a brand identity. All you need is custom packaging and a storefront that matches. Custom coffee cups are the single best way you can exude the type of brand you want to be perceived as and the type of customers you want to attract. Stock coffee cups say nothing about your brand except that you sell some sort of functional coffee.

With customizable paper coffee cups, you can choose a cup design that matches your vibe and then use colors and graphics to make that cup your own. By simply taking an expense item and putting a layer of ink on it, you turn it into a powerful branding and marketing tool that gives you a voice on the local coffee scene. 

You can take customization a step further and choose a memorable and unique style of cup, like a hollow rotating paper cup. The rotating style involves creating a wrap-around graphic design and a peekaboo window. This cup creates a fun and whimsical energy around your brand, makes your brand memorable, and makes the cup very shareable on social media.

Brand Recognition

In order for your target market to start to recognize your brand, they need to see your branding consistently. This can happen very organically with a custom coffee cup. From your customer holding the cup on their morning train ride, to placing it on their desk at work, to snapping a shot with it for their morning social media post. Your brand can consistently show up everywhere without any additional time and effort coming from you.

You Can Increase Your Pricing

Coffee is big business today. People will pay anywhere from $2 to $20 for a cup of coffee. The difference between $2 and $20 is your brand identity. If you can associate a certain feeling with your brand, you can charge premium prices. For example, a coffee shop with a sleek, modern design, a pastel color palette, and a minimalist logo with a unique coffee cup style to match can project a premium energy and charge premium prices. 

A coffee shop lacking in personality and using generic paper coffee cups projects a functional energy and must charge functional pricing - meaning a little more than how much the coffee itself is worth. Your brand identity goes a long way in setting you apart from your competitors and dictating how much customers are willing to pay.

Makes Customers Feel Special

When you spend time and money on your packaging, you make your customers feel special by association. Aesthetically pleasing things impress us, and a coffee cup with a snap-worthy aesthetic makes us feel good when we’re holding it. Taking that time and energy to create a brand story and relay that story on your cup also signals to the customer that you care about the details and, by extension, you care about them. If you can make your customers feel something positive, they will come back for that feeling again. That’s Marketing 101. 

Quietly Signals Professionalism

A company that cares about details like what their packaging looks like is a silent indicator of how they approach everything else in their business. Branded packaging instantly signals professionalism. It means you’re serious about your business and the image you want to curate. It also indicates you’re in it for the long haul and are willing to spend the time and money to create an experience for your customers. 

Allows You to Become a Part of Your Customer’s Lives

People love holidays, and they love things associated with holidays. That’s why people love it when their favorite coffee shop switches from their standard cups to holiday ones. While previously, holiday-themed packaging was the domain of large coffee chains because of high MOQs, now small coffee businesses can get in on the action too. 

If you want your customers to come back for more of your delicious coffee and share your coffee on their social media, themed cups are the answer. Your coffee cups can help you be a part of the conversation year-round, from Christmas to St. Patrick’s Day to Halloween. 

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Why Many Small Businesses Don’t Use Custom Coffee Cups 

Custom coffee cups are always better than stock generics, so why don’t most small businesses use them? The biggest reasons are minimum order quantity (MOQ) requirements, design challenges, and costs. 

MOQ

Most small coffee businesses do not order custom paper coffee cups because of MOQs.Factories producing custom coffee cups often require very large orders. The minimum requirements can sometimes be so high that a small business may not use that number of cups in a whole year. 

Even when customers can use large quantities, they may not want to order such large numbers because they don’t have the storage space. Another prohibitive factor is that small businesses may not want to tie up that much cash in stock. 

Design 

Some small businesses hesitate to delve into custom coffee cups because the idea of hiring a logo and graphics designer sounds complicated and expensive. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth. First off, you can easily create your own design using a free version of software like Canva. Alternatively, you can find freelance graphic designers on sites like Fiverr who can design something for you for as little as $5. And custom coffee cup companies like Leaf Packaging even offer free design services.

Costs

A custom paper coffee cup can cost more than a stock paper coffee cup. The additional costs vary greatly depending on cup material, quantity, size, and design. A plain paper coffee cup with a single color logo can be less expensive than a leather-textured cup or a cup with a full wraparound design. There are far more inexpensive options for custom design available today than there ever were before.  The thing most small businesses forget to remember is that the additional cost is actually for marketing and not an additional supply expense.

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How to Choose the Best Custom Coffee Cup Supplier For You

There are many custom coffee cup suppliers available online, and each will have its own way of working. As a small business, you need a supplier that’s flexible and can work with you while knowing your constraints. A great supplier will be able to guide you through the process and answer all of your questions. 

You should consider the following things when evaluating different suppliers:

• MOQ

• Lead Times

• Print Quality

• Material and Lid Options

• Certifications

• Transparent Pricing

• Reorder Process

The most important thing when selecting a new supplier is how easy they are to work with at the onset. Are they easy to reach? Are they willing to help you figure out your first order? Are they clear and transparent with all of their answers? Finding a great supplier to work with is half of the challenge, but when you find one, they can make the whole process easy and smooth.

Next Steps

Moving from stock cups to custom cups may seem daunting at first, but it can be very simple. All of the steps you need to take are quite easy, and some of the steps you may have already taken when you opened your business. 

Before you do anything, you need to define your missions and values, and with that, a brand identity. Once that is determined, everything gets easier and you can move on to the fun parts like deciding on a brand color palette and designing a logo. 

Next, decide on the quantity that you need and begin contacting custom coffee cup suppliers for custom coffee cup options and pricing. If you’re ready to get started but need some help, you can contact us at Leaf Packaging, and one of our custom packaging specialists will be happy to help. 

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