A tea room that became a yogurt shop.

Pinkberry began as a different plan. The Los Angeles Times reported on 4 August 2006 that Hyekyung Hwang, known as Shelly, had signed a lease about two and a half years earlier on a small space on Huntley Drive, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, intending to open an English tea room. The paper said neighbours voted down her requests for outdoor seating and for a beer and wine licence, and that after running the numbers she dropped the idea and decided to open a frozen-yogurt shop instead. The Times said Hwang had come to the United States from South Korea in 1992 to attend business school at the University of Southern California.

Her business partner was Young Lee, whom the same article described as a former kickboxer and nightclub bouncer who had become an architect designing clubs. English Wikipedia dates the opening of the first shop to January 2005, and the Times said it was already making a profit by February that year, one month after opening. The menu was deliberately narrow: the paper said the only yogurts were plain and green tea, with fresh fruit and other toppings, and nothing else for sale, not even water.

The shop drew queues. The Times described lines of customers stretching up the block and around the corner and cars circling the residential street for parking,. The paper said customers came from Los Feliz, the San Fernando Valley, the South Bay and Beverly Hills, some of them several nights a week.

Wikipedia says a second shop opened in August 2006 and a third, at La Brea and Melrose avenues, in early September 2006, followed by stores elsewhere in Southern California and in New York. In April 2010, citing the Los Angeles Times, Wikipedia says the original Huntley Drive shop, which had never solved its parking problem, closed to customers and was converted into an administrative building for the chain.

Investors, Kahala Brands and MTY Food Group.

Growth brought outside money. Wikipedia says that on 16 October 2007 Pinkberry took an investment from Maveron, the venture fund co-founded by Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, to take the concept across the United States. In May 2009, citing Nation’s Restaurant News, Wikipedia says the company announced a partnership with the Kuwaiti retailer M.H. Alshaya to open shops in the Middle East, and an agreement with HMSHost to open locations in airports.

In December 2015 the chain was sold. The Los Angeles Times reported on 14 December 2015 that Pinkberry had been acquired by Kahala Brands, a restaurant franchising company based in Scottsdale, Arizona, whose other names included Cold Stone Creamery. Kahala’s chief executive, Michael Serruya, said the company would use its infrastructure to help the brand keep evolving, and the paper said Kahala planned to consolidate Pinkberry’s corporate operations and run its franchising from Scottsdale. Terms were not disclosed.

The new owner was itself acquired the following year. Wikipedia, citing a PR Newswire release of 26 July 2016, says MTY Food Group of Montreal, Quebec, completed its acquisition of Kahala Brands that month, and that Kahala stayed in its Scottsdale headquarters while MTY’s United States operations moved into Kahala’s offices. MTY Food Group has owned Kahala Brands, and with it Pinkberry, since 2016.

Pinkberry’s name has also turned up in film and television. Wikipedia lists appearances or mentions in an episode of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, the 2014 films Still Alice and Horrible Bosses 2, and an episode of And Just Like That in 2021.

Design and documentation.

Counter-service chains in general carry their identity on a small set of surfaces that a customer handles or reads in a few minutes: the sign above the door, the menu board behind the counter, the cup or bowl that leaves the shop, and the bag or napkin that goes with it. Because the same name has to work on a tall roadside sign and on a printed lid, these marks tend to be drawn as short words or simple shapes that survive being shrunk, embroidered on a uniform or lit from behind.

Colour does a second job on the menu board. A counter-service chain can use a set of colours to group drinks or dishes by flavour or category, so the palette becomes a way of reading the menu as well as a way of recognising the shop. Storefronts add materials, lighting and furniture, and a refit can change how a chain feels without any change to its name.

Each guide below records who started the brand, who has owned it since, and how its name, logo, cups and shops have changed, using dated independent sources and marking what rests on the company’s own word.

Sherbet walls, Starck chairs and a branding studio.

From the start, the shop interior was part of the brand, and the person who designed it was one of the founders. The Los Angeles Times said in 2006 that Young Lee believed aesthetics mattered even for a visit of twenty minutes, so he painted the inside of the Huntley Drive shop in sherbet hues of peach, green and blue, furnished it with Philippe Starck furniture and hung Le Klint plastic lamps bought from Design Within Reach, because, he told the paper, they reminded him of yogurt. The Times summed up the effect as “modern Asian, not kindergarten”. Hwang and Lee, the paper said, agreed that the store should be streamlined, which matched a menu limited to plain and green tea yogurt.

The graphic identity came from an outside studio. The Los Angeles branding firm Ferroconcrete lists Pinkberry among its projects; its project page, as archived, says it took on the work with one store open and a franchise on the way, and describes the result as a “fresh, original, modern brand” built around quality, taste and lifestyle. Ferroconcrete says it also developed the idea of “Pinkberry Groupies”, a name for fans who shared photographs and stories about the yogurt. Wikipedia also credits Ferroconcrete with designing and managing the brand.

The company has guarded that look. The Los Angeles Times reported in December 2015 that Pinkberry had sued competing chains, accusing them of copying its branding, including its minimalist decor and the use of part of its name.

For a design guide, Pinkberry shows how a small shop can make its interior, its colours and its furniture do as much work as its sign, with an architect founder choosing the lamps and a branding studio shaping the name around the room. Compare it with Jamba, a California smoothie chain that moved its stores from bright colours to light wood in 2019, and Baskin-Robbins, a counter-service ice-cream chain with its own guide in this series. For this guide we use berry pink, sherbet green and peach with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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