SEY Coffee

Overview SEY is the Brooklyn micro roastery that lets the coffee speak for itself. Founded in 2013 by Lance Schnorenberg and Tobin Polk, who roasted hard-to-find lots from a Bushwick loft under the name Lofted Coffee, it became SEY, “yes” spelled backwards, when the roastery and café on Grattan Street opened in 2017. Food & Wine named it the Best Coffee Shop in America in 2019. SEY roasts some of the most sought-after lots in the world, from Gesha Village and Elida Estate to the Mijane family’s Halo Hartume washing station in Gedeb, and publishes what it paid for every one of them. Huettun Labs worked with SEY’s founders and team on seycoffee.com. Huettun’s scope covered brand consultancy for the digital experience, UI/UX design and development of the custom Shopify storefront, including its subscription builder and commerce integrations.

The challenge SEY’s customers are the most informed in coffee. They want varietal, altitude, harvest date and processing method before they want a lifestyle photo, and they want to know what the producer was paid. The store had to carry a catalogue of forty-plus single lots that changes with the seasons, make a subscription configurable rather than one-size-fits-all, serve wholesale partners and job seekers, and stay as quiet and precise as the roasts. It also had to be accessible to readers who find standard type hard to read.

Brand consultancy (Huettun Labs) Quiet confidence as a digital principle. We worked with SEY’s identity, its monochrome palette, condensed grotesque wordmark and refined serif, to define how little the storefront needs: type, whitespace, one photograph per idea and the coffee data doing the talking. “Drink beautiful coffee.” The three-word manifesto was set as the opening statement across the homepage and About, with the longer promise, “a brilliant spectrum of flavors, aromatics, and acidities”, as the site’s description. Transparency as brand. SEY’s commitment to publishing FOB and DDP prices per kilogram for every lot became a designed module, “Pricing Details”, on each product page, turning a values statement into a product feature. Producer-first storytelling. Product pages are structured around the producer and the varietal, with “About Halo Hartume” and “About Ethiopian Landrace” sections, so the farm, not the roaster, is the hero.

UI and UX design (Huettun Labs) Visual system. Black and grey type on white, GT America Condensed for headlines, labels and navigation, GT Super for reading passages, and a disciplined grid that scales from phone to wide desktop. Homepage as a tasting menu. Hero statement, Our Approach, a Subscriptions feature, a single Spotlight coffee with tasting notes, News & Events and a footer with hours, address and contact. Current Selections. A catalogue of forty-plus lots listed by producer, farm, varietal, process and country, in a dense, scannable table-like grid rather than lifestyle tiles. Product pages for experts. Size and price selection (250g and 2lb), roast-and-ship schedule, then varietal, region, altitude, harvest, step-by-step processing, producer and varietal essays, and the Pricing Details block with FOB and DDP per kilogram. Subscription builder. A configurator where customers choose the number of 250g boxes and 2lb bags per four-week shipment, toggle decaffeinated options, see a live total, get a warning if their configuration would duplicate coffees in a six-lot volume, and gift a prepaid subscription by number of installments. Accessibility. A built-in font toggle that switches the site to an accessible sans and to OpenDyslexic for dyslexic readers, alongside descriptive alt text on every homepage image. Café, wholesale, jobs, community. A café page with hours and the laptop policy, a wholesale page with a direct contact, a jobs page with salaries listed on every role, a Discord community link and Eventbrite cupping registrations.

Website development (Huettun Labs) Platform. Shopify Online Store 2.0 with a fully custom theme built for SEY from the ground up, not a theme-store template, so the small team can publish new lots and seasons without a developer. Subscription application. A React application embedded in the Shopify theme and wired to Recharge through the cart and product APIs, handling configuration, duplicate-lot detection, live pricing and prepaid gifting. Accessibility layer. Self-hosted accessible typefaces including OpenDyslexic, switchable at runtime and persisted for the visitor. Retention and operations. Klaviyo email, Mailchimp newsletter capture, Route shipping protection, Loop returns and a wholesale program. Checkout and payments. Shop Pay accelerated checkout and PayPal. Agent-ready commerce. An agentic discovery sitemap and Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) endpoint so AI shopping assistants can discover and buy from the catalogue. Performance and security. Shopify’s global edge with Cloudflare, early hints, a lean 70 KB homepage, HSTS, a content security policy and clickjacking protection. SEO foundations. Canonical URLs, Open Graph metadata, and real-time product, collection, page, blog and article sitemaps.

Results A storefront as precise as the roasts: a 70 KB homepage, one photograph per idea and forty-plus lots a click away. A configurable subscription that lets customers build their own four-week shipment and gift prepaid volumes, instead of a single fixed plan. Radical price transparency, FOB and DDP per kilogram on every lot, built into the product page rather than buried in a PDF. An accessible reading experience with a dyslexia-friendly font toggle, rare in e-commerce.

Services delivered by Huettun Labs Brand consultancy · Digital brand expression · Content strategy · UI/UX design · Design system and typography · Shopify theme development · React application development · Subscription integration · Accessibility · Performance optimisation · Technical SEO

Technology Shopify OS 2.0 · Custom theme · React · Recharge · Klaviyo · Mailchimp · Route · Loop · Shop Pay · PayPal · OpenDyslexic · Cloudflare · Universal Commerce Protocol