Frank and Honest: Embrace Your Dark Side. Dare to Try?

Frank and Honest, Ireland’s leading self-service coffee brand, faced an unusual interactive challenge. Across more than 710 machines, customers were offered the familiar House Blend beside an unlabelled “Guest Blend”. Despite almost no advertising or explanation, 18% were already choosing the mystery option, exceeding the 15% participation target. The behaviour existed. It simply lacked a name, a personality and a reason to be remembered.

Our objective was not to persuade people that dark-roast coffee existed. It was to transform an anonymous second button into a meaningful choice at the exact moment of decision.

“Embrace Your Dark Side. Dare to Try?” turned the decision between two blends into a playful expression of identity. House Blend became the dependable, halo-wearing choice. Dark Roast became its horned, mischievous counterpart. The halo-and-horns device transformed product architecture into character design, allowing customers to understand instantly that their familiar coffee remained, a bolder alternative had arrived, and choosing it said something about them.

The experience centred on choice itself. A “Choice” animation dramatised the internal debate between angelic House Blend and tempting Dark Roast, while personality-test carousels such as “Do you: A) Colour inside the lines. B) There are lines?” let audiences self-select into the bolder identity. On machine and menu screens, the same visual language appeared at the point of purchase, connecting digital storytelling directly to a physical button press.

The result was a connected system rather than a collection of resized ads. A customer could encounter the horned cup on social, meet it again across the Pearse Street Underpass, then find the same world on the ordering screen, with every touchpoint preparing them for one behaviour: press the other button.

AI-assisted visual development accelerated exploration of lighting, texture and character, while human art direction kept the system coherent across constrained formats. Built for a half-awake customer at 7am yet rich enough for social play, the platform made choice feel revealing rather than transactional.

Frank and Honest did not simply launch another coffee. It gave a button a personality, and turned one of the smallest interactions in the customer journey into a memorable creative idea.