How To Successfully Rebrand Bad Ass Coffee of Hawaii underwent an infra-structure overhaul under new ownership. Images courtesy of Bad Ass Coffee marketplace changes. Sometimes, they simply go out of style. Many restaurants successfully rebrand and at varying de-grees. Some do a simple refresh while others do a complete revamp from top to bottom. Others fall somewhere in the middle, which is where Bad Ass Coffee landed on the makeover spectrum. The Infrastructure Overhaul: Bad Ass Coffee Brand success comes down to three things: The brand, the prod-uct, and the infrastructure (mean-ing the people, processes, systems, technology, innovation), according to Snyder. Bad Ass performed strongly on the first two, but the third was broken. “Building an infrastructure from the ground up is a very time-consuming and expensive proposition but it’s also a very fixable one,” says Snyder. When reviving a brand, he ex-plains, it’s important to look at its differentiators. For Bad Ass they had the focus on Hawaii; everything else was dated. To start, Snyder wanted to focus on what would make the biggest impact. “What are the must-haves, need-to-haves and then like-to-haves?” he asks. He knew stores needed updating with visible changes while ensuring they didn’t alienate loyal customers. The new and improved Bad Ass Coffee “is a much more sophisticated escape to Hawaii,” says Snyder. He changed the colors to more natural outdoor greens and blues, the artwork is vintage Hawaiian, the menu is more By Amanda Baltazar n 2020, Bad Ass Coffee of Hawaii relaunched with a new store design, new logo, new packaging, and a new business model — a complete rebrand for the Centennial, Colo.-based company. It was the start of a new era for the brand, which had been purchased by Royal Aloha Coffee just the year before. The new CEO, Scott Snyder, saw Bad Ass as an opportunity but one that needed fine tuning since it hadn’t sold a franchise in 10 years. “I saw a brand name that was catchy, memorable, dis-ruptive, funny and loveable. I also saw that the coffee was great. However, the brand hadn’t been touched in 25 years.” Bad Ass isn’t an unusual case. Over time, many brands grow stale or lose their way. Either no one pays at-tention to them or the customers or the I 52 • restaurant development + design • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2023