Voodoo Doughnut Brand Guidelines: Portland’s Pink Boxes, Baron Samedi & Late Nights

Two Portland friends and a shop between nightclubs.

Voodoo Doughnut opened in Portland, Oregon, in May 2003, in a shop on Southwest Third Avenue in the Old Town district, English Wikipedia says. Its founders were Kenneth “Cat Daddy” Pogson and Richard “Tres” Shannon. The company’s own account says the two old friends, both Portlanders with a background in entertainment, decided in 2000 to go into business together, concluded that downtown Portland lacked a doughnut shop, and rented a small storefront between two nightclubs. They joked, it says, about “world doughnut domination.”

The shop kept night hours at first: English Wikipedia says it opened only at night until 2006. A second Portland shop, Voodoo Doughnut Too, opened on Northeast Davis Street in 2008, and a third, in Eugene, Oregon, in 2010. On 24 December 2008, English Wikipedia says, Portland’s city council passed a resolution naming Voodoo’s Portland Crème the city’s official doughnut. By 2011 the Portland shops were also hosting legal weddings and commitment ceremonies, and the company’s website still offers both legally binding and non-legal ceremonies at its shops. By 2011 the two Portland shops and the Eugene shop were open 24 hours a day, and that spring the original shop was remodelled to take in space next door, mostly to enlarge the kitchen, English Wikipedia says.

The shop became part of Portland’s image of itself. English Wikipedia notes that it appeared in the second season of Portlandia in January 2012, after a 2007 episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations; in December 2012 a Simpsons episode that crossed over with Portlandia parodied it as “Devil Doughnuts.” It also says that in August 2011 staff built an oversized box at the Portland Bridge Festival and filled it with 666 pounds of doughnuts, a figure Shannon tied to the company’s “voodoo theme,” setting a Guinness World Record for the largest box of doughnuts. Between 2011 and 2016 the company worked with Rogue Ales on bottled beers based on its doughnut flavours, and in 2014 the founders started a record label, Voodoo Doughnut Recordings.

Private equity and a national map.

In 2017 Voodoo took in outside capital. Eater Portland reported on 29 September 2017, citing the Portland Business Journal, that the San Francisco private-equity firm Fundamental Capital had bought a sizable share of the company, with terms undisclosed. Pogson and Shannon told the Business Journal that they kept “significant ownership and influence,” two Fundamental Capital partners joined the board, and the Portland firm Meriwether Group arranged the partnership. English Wikipedia describes the stake as a majority.

A professional manager followed. In January 2018 KATU reported the appointment of Chris Schultz as chief executive; he had been senior vice president of operations at MOD Pizza and had spent 13 years at Starbucks as an operational adviser. At that time, KATU reported, Voodoo had six locations in four states, the newest at Universal CityWalk in Hollywood.

The chain then spread well beyond the Pacific Northwest. In October 2025 Eater New York reported that Voodoo had chosen Union Square West for its first New York City shop, one of three new expansions that included Miami. In November 2026 the company’s locations page listed shops in Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Texas, California, Florida, Illinois, Arizona and New York, including Union Square in Manhattan and Universal’s CityWalk sites in Hollywood and Orlando. Not every plan went ahead: English Wikipedia says plans for a shop in the French Quarter of New Orleans were dropped in the summer of 2023 after Vodou practitioners and historic preservationists objected to the company’s name and imagery.

Rings, boxes and counters.

Doughnut, cookie and cupcake chains sell small things that are eaten quickly, so much of their identity has to work at the counter and in the hand. The box, the bag and the cup travel further than any shop sign in a takeaway trade. Crumbl is a clear case: its own history page calls its long pink box a signature, and Restaurant Business wrote in 2026 that the box makes the cookies look almost as if they are on display.

The product itself is often the second carrier. Glazed rings seen through a window, warm cookies on a counter and cupcakes stacked into towers are the images these companies choose to publish on their own sites and social channels. Some chains add a time or a temperature to the promise: Insomnia Cookies built its name around warm cookies sold late into the night, with shops near college campuses open until 3 a.m., as Restaurant Business reported in 2018.

Flavour naming tends to be plain and descriptive. A cookie or doughnut is usually named after the dessert or ingredient it borrows from, as with the Blueberry Muffin and Dubai Chocolate Brownie that Restaurant Business reported on Crumbl’s menu in 2026, and rotating or seasonal flavours are announced week by week so that the menu itself becomes news. Shops are generally identified by their town, street or campus rather than given names of their own.

Behind the shopfront, corporate pages tell a founder story and, more rarely, an ownership story. Several of the chains in this group began with one person or one family and one shop, then passed through franchising, a larger food company or a private-equity investor. Those changes are dated in trade and business press, and each guide here gives them as dated facts.

Baron Samedi and the pink box.

Voodoo’s identity rests on two things: a mark and a box. English Wikipedia says the logo includes a depiction of Baron Samedi, a figure from Haitian Vodou, and credits the Portland graphic designer Michael King with the Voodoo Doughnut logo; King began his career making posters for local punk bands in the late 1970s and founded the studio Crash Design America.

The pink box came from California. The Los Angeles Times reported in May 2017 that pink doughnut boxes spread through Southern California’s independent doughnut shops in the late 1970s and early 1980s, largely because the stock cost less than white, and that a trip to California about 15 years earlier had led Pogson to adopt pink for Voodoo. The paper traced the colour to the Pico Rivera supplier Westco, which, according to company lore, found leftover pink cardboard when a shop owner asked for a cheaper box. The paper gave the shop’s slogan as “Good things come in pink boxes.” The doughnuts lean on names and shapes: Eater New York in 2025 listed the bacon maple bar, the Grape Ape and vegan options, and the company’s 2018 announcement, as reported by KATU, named the Bacon Maple Bar, the Portland Cream and the Memphis Mafia as its own creations. The wedding business carries the same tone: the company’s website offers custom “Newlywed Dolls” made to resemble the couple, and oversized doughnut centrepieces for the dessert table.

For a design guide, Voodoo Doughnut shows how a late-night shop can turn a regional box colour and a single figure from its name into a signature that travels from city to city. Compare Randy’s Donuts, another West Coast doughnut shop, and Krispy Kreme. For this guide we use a box pink, a near-black and a teal with a heavy display serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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