The Alley Brand Guidelines: A Taoyuan Designer’s Deer Logo, Deerioca & Aurora Drinks

A design-firm owner tries a tea shop.

The Alley — 鹿角巷, “deer antler alley,” in Chinese — is a Taiwanese chain of tea-drink shops started by a designer. The business magazine Manager Today (經理人), in a June 2019 article drawn from a book on running tea-drink shops by the publisher of Living & Design (漂亮家居), says its founder, Chiu Mao-ting (邱茂庭), grew up in Taoyuan, studied design, set up a design company in 2012 and taught part-time at two universities. Around 2013, the article says, when a wave of new businesses was starting in Taiwan, he decided to try a drinks shop, reasoning that he could go back to design if it failed.

He founded the brand in 2013, according to Manager Today, first under the name 斜角巷, “slanting alley,” before settling on 鹿角巷 THE ALLEY. Chinese Wikipedia also gives May 2013 and places the first shop in Zhongli District, Taoyuan, and it says the brand belongs to a company called 有樂股份有限公司. English Wikipedia and Eater New York, in September 2019, give 2015 as the start instead; English Wikipedia calls Chiu a graphic designer, while the Georgia Straight in Vancouver reported in April 2019 that the chain was created by four interior designers. Both accounts are given here.

The first year was harder than expected. Manager Today says Chiu found that making tea drinks meant controlling temperature and the ratio of tea to water, and learned from a friend who already ran a tea shop. By its account the brand reached central Taiwan in April 2015 and southern Taiwan in May 2015.

The name has its own story. The Alley’s operations manager in Vancouver told the Georgia Straight that it pays homage to Taiwan’s alleyways, where people buy a drink from a stall as they walk; the founders, he said, wanted a place where people could sit down and get away from the busy street instead.

A deer, a short cup and a coloured drink.

Chiu treated the brand as a design job, Manager Today says. Because the Chinese name contains a deer, he put a deer’s head into the logo as a sign to make people curious enough to walk in. When most tea shops used tall, slim cups, he went the other way and chose a small, short round cup, so that the pack itself would be remembered. English Wikipedia also notes that the logo shows a deer.

The shops follow the same thinking. After the brand went abroad, the article says, its stores took on a clear industrial style, with the deer-head logo printed large as the main feature of the room; when sales were slow at first, Chiu added a tree and chairs so that the shop felt like a place to stay. The Georgia Straight described the Vancouver shop in 2019 as industrial and modern, with wooden tables, a brick wall and deer-themed decoration.

The drinks were designed to be looked at. Manager Today says the team worked on colour, and points to the Aurora (北極光) series of multicoloured drinks. The Georgia Straight described the Aurora slush drinks, named Morning Dawn and Northern Lights, as layered in shades and served in a clear bottle, with butterfly-pea tea, mango and jasmine tea among the flavours. The signature, though, is Deerioca: the brand’s own name for its tapioca pearls, which the Straight said are cooked with brown sugar for two hours. Eater New York named the brown sugar Deerioca with crème brûlée milk as the most popular item and said its colour nods to the deer logo. The Straight also singled out the Royal No.9 series, a red tea with a blueberry note.

The Alley says it makes its own sugar-cane syrup in-house and rolls its pearls from scratch, and Eater New York reported in 2019 that most of its ingredients were imported from Taiwan.

Design and documentation.

Bubble tea and tea-drink chains sell a drink that is made in front of the customer, so most of their public image is built around the cup. On their own websites, Taiwanese brands such as Chatime and Gong Cha lead with pictures of individual drinks and group them into named ranges and short lists: Gong Cha calls its top five drinks worldwide the “Famous Five,” and Chatime’s US website sorts its menu into ranges such as Signatures, Milk Tea Classics and Fruity.

Drink and staff names do much of the brand work. Chatime’s US website builds its copy on tea puns, calling its counter staff “T-Ristas,” while Gong Cha names drinks by their tea, fruit and toppings, from milk foam to “QQ” jelly. Store fronts and menu boards appear in the companies’ franchise pages and news posts, where a new store design or a first store in a new country is presented as an event.

Ordering apps and online shops are now part of the picture. In 2020 the Taipei Times reported that Chatime’s parent, La Kaffa International, had begun taking orders through an app with a software partner, and in 2026 Nation’s Restaurant News reported that Gong Cha was rolling out a “digital kitchen.” For a designer, these tools are part of the brand as much as the cup or the counter.

Behind the cups are corporate histories that are often more complicated than the store fronts suggest. Many chains grew through franchising, with regional partners running whole countries, and some have changed owners several times. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it now, and how it is sold — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Canada first, then the world.

The brand’s first shop outside Taiwan opened in Canada on 7 May 2016, according to Manager Today. In 2017 it followed with Japan, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Vietnam, and in 2018 with France, Australia, South Korea, Los Angeles, Thailand and New Zealand, by the magazine’s count. It put the total at about 200 shops in mid-2019, and said that copycat shops had pushed the company to open genuine branches quickly and that its overseas trademark registrations were completed that year. Eater New York and the Singapore Business Times both gave a figure of about 300 the same year.

The 2019 openings show how it travels. Vancouver’s first shop opened downtown in late April 2019, the Georgia Straight reported. In Singapore, the Business Times reported in May 2019, The Alley arrived in April at Jewel Changi Airport, and its local operator trained at the firm’s research and development centre in Shanghai; it called The Alley Luxe, a black, marble and gold shop at Orchard Cineleisure, the chain’s first premium concept. New York’s first shop opened that September on Cooper Square in the East Village, Eater New York reported.

The brand has kept growing through partnerships. Manager Today mentions a drink made with PUMA in 2018 and an official drink for the 58th Asia-Pacific Film Festival the same year. Chinese Wikipedia lists character tie-ins with LINE Friends in 2019, with Sanrio’s Pompompurin in Hong Kong in 2022, and with the anime Chainsaw Man, licensed through Crunchyroll, in 2023, each with themed drinks and cup sleeves. English Wikipedia counts roughly 450 locations in 18 countries as of 2024.

For a design guide, The Alley shows what happens when a designer starts a drinks brand: the deer, the short round cup, the industrial rooms and the colour-layered drinks were each chosen to be remembered, before the menu had to explain itself. Compare it with Tiger Sugar, another Taiwanese brand built on brown sugar, and Chatime. For this guide we use brown sugar, antler cream, aurora violet and alley black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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