A Seattle coffeehouse brand with a Japanese licensee.

Tully’s Coffee was a Seattle coffeehouse chain founded in 1992 by Tom “Tully” O’Keefe. English Wikipedia says the first store opened in Kent, Washington, in September 1992, and The New York Times, in a report carried by The Bulletin of Bend, Oregon, on 5 January 2013, gave the same founding year. Writing in the Seattle Weekly in April 2018, Rick Anderson said the chain had been founded “with the intention of becoming the next Starbucks.” Wikipedia says that the company followed, for a time, a strategy of opening stores next to Starbucks shops in its home city.

The chain grew around the Puget Sound. Wikipedia says it operated stores in the Greater Puget Sound area of Washington and in California, Idaho, Arizona and Colorado, sold coffee through franchisees and grocery coffee shops, and licensed its brand for use in South Korea and Japan. The Seattle Weekly said O’Keefe had hoped to take the company public before the 2007 stock-market slump ended its plan for an initial public offering, and that he retired in 2010.

The Japanese business took a separate course early on. Wikipedia says Tully’s opened its first Japanese outlet in Ginza, Tokyo, in 1997, after a Sanwa Bank employee, Kota Matsuda, personally appealed to O’Keefe to open high-quality coffee shops in Japan. Matsuda became chief executive of Tully’s Coffee Japan, a joint venture between Tully’s, Matsuda and outside investors, and the Japanese chain expanded through franchising. Wikipedia says the US company sold a portfolio of intellectual property to Tully’s Coffee Japan in August 2005, and that the Japanese tea maker Ito En acquired Tully’s Coffee Japan in 2006. A 2017 investor report on Ito En by Bridge Salon describes the group as operating restaurants and the franchise business of Tully’s Coffee.

Green Mountain, a bankruptcy auction and the end of the US chain.

In 2009, Wikipedia says, Tully’s sold its North American wholesale coffee business, the brand itself and its roasting operation to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, licensing the brand back for its own coffee shops and keeping the retail rights for North America. The Associated Press confirmed the arrangement in January 2013, reporting that Green Mountain owned the wholesale side of the Tully’s brand, which included coffee in bags and single-serve packs sold in supermarkets and other stores.

Tully’s, then owned by TC Global Inc., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October 2012, citing the cost of its leases, The New York Times reported. In January 2013 an investment group called Global Baristas LLC, led by the actor Patrick Dempsey, won the auction for the chain. On 11 January 2013, the AP’s Donna Gordon Blankinship reported, Judge Karen Overstreet approved the sale in federal bankruptcy court in Seattle over an objection from AgriNurture, a company that had made a joint offer with Starbucks; the AP said Starbucks had wanted to convert some of the Tully’s shops into Starbucks stores while the rest kept the Tully’s name. Green Mountain, the AP said, had preferred to keep the chain intact under the Tully’s name. Dempsey said he was “very proud to be a new business owner” in Seattle.

The partnership did not last. The Seattle Weekly reported in April 2018 that Dempsey had left the investor group within a few months and that the Los Angeles lawyer Michael Avenatti was the lead investor. The same report said Keurig Green Mountain owned the Tully’s trademark and had licensed it to the coffee shops, and that Keurig said in court papers that the licence had ended by default in December 2017. By early April 2018, the paper said, the remaining stores in and around Seattle were all “temporarily” closed.

The shops did not reopen under the name. Wikipedia says Tully’s US coffeehouse business was officially closed in September 2018, when Keurig and Global Baristas entered a permanent injunction under which Global Baristas agreed never again to operate a coffee chain, or any other food or beverage business, under the Tully’s name, and that Keurig would continue to sell Tully’s branded coffee.

Design and documentation.

Coffee-house and deli chains carry their identity on many surfaces at once. A name and a mark sit on the street sign and the shopfront, then repeat on paper cups, sleeves, lids, carry-out bags, sandwich wraps and loyalty cards, and again on the menu board above the counter. Each of those surfaces is printed or built by different suppliers, often in different places, so a chain’s visual system has to survive changes of material, size and colour reproduction.

The menu board is where much of the design work shows. It has to hold a name, prices and category headings at reading distance, and over the past two decades many chains have moved from printed panels to screens, which changes how type, colour and photography are used. Interiors carry the identity too: counter fronts, seating, lighting, wall graphics and the colour of the walls themselves are part of how a chain presents its name.

Each guide below looks at who started the brand, who owns it now and how its name and mark appear, separating what independent dated sources record from what the company says about itself.

One name, three lives.

The Tully’s name now lives in several places at once. It began as a founder’s nickname — Tom O’Keefe was known as “Tully” — on a chain of Seattle coffee shops. After 2009 the same name also appeared on supermarket coffee owned by Green Mountain, later Keurig; Wikipedia says Keurig continues to sell Tully’s coffee in its K-Cup single-serve format and as bagged ground coffee. In Japan, the name has been used since 1997 on coffee houses run through the franchise business that Ito En has owned since 2006.

Each of these owners has used the name under a different set of rights. Wikipedia says that when Green Mountain bought the brand in 2009, the original Seattle company kept the retail rights for North America and the wholesale and retail rights for the rest of the world except Japan, where the rights had already been sold to Tully’s Coffee Japan. The AP’s 2013 report shows the result in practice: one company owned the supermarket coffee, another ran the cafés, and the bidders for the cafés had to work around that division. When the licence for the American cafés ended, the cafés lost the name while the coffee on supermarket shelves kept it.

The story of the Seattle chain has also been retold in the press as a coffeehouse rivalry. The Seattle Weekly in 2018 described a chain founded to become “the next Starbucks,” and the AP in 2013 reported Starbucks among the bidders for its shops. The New York Times, reporting Patrick Dempsey’s winning bid in January 2013, noted that the actor played a surgeon on Grey’s Anatomy.

For a design guide, Tully’s Coffee shows how a brand name can outlive the business that created it when it is split between a packaged-coffee owner and an overseas licensee, so that a single word stands for coffee shops in Japan and for bags and pods in American supermarkets. Compare it with Starbucks, the Seattle chain Tully’s was set up to rival, and Peet’s Coffee, another West Coast coffee brand. For this guide we use burgundy, roasted gold and steamed milk with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Tully’s Coffee’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.