The original drawing of the Starbucks brand signature or logo was based on a 15th century Norse woodcut of a two-tailed siren. In a mythological mermaid, Terry Heckler found the perfect metaphor for the siren song of coffee that lures us cupside.
Back when Starbucks was a start-up, Heckler Associates helped to create the best brand name and logo. We continued to work on Starbucks marketing for another 14 years,
and the siren logo we designed proved to be bold enough to hold all the brand's promise, growth and success.
The original drawing of the Starbucks brand signature or logo was based on a 15th century Norse woodcut of a two-tailed siren. In a mythological mermaid, Terry Heckler found the perfect metaphor for the siren song of coffee that lures us cupside.
Starbucks was founded in 1971 by Gordon Bowker, Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl, a writer, a literature teacher and a history teacher, respectively, three friends who attended San Francisco State together. Gordon had become tired of driving from Seattle to Vancouver, B.C. every month to get good coffee and thought it a good idea to start a company to import, roast and sell fine coffee beans.
The three owners set out to give the enterprise a name. One of the early favorites was "Pequod," the name of Captain Ahab's ship in Moby Dick.
"People won't buy a cup of 'Pequod' coffee," Terry Heckler told them. The owners challenged him to come up with another. Terry's research revealed the names of several late-1800s mining camps on nearby Mt. Rainier, among them "Starbos." When he presented the name to the guys, they responded "Starbuck—first mate on the Pequod." Terry agreed that the name would work, but knew that in conversation people would probably say "Starbucks," so Starbucks it was.
Along with their high regard for Moby Dick as the great American novel, the three Starbucks founders also believed that Peet's was the greatest American coffee. So before they started their own coffee company in earnest, they went to San Francisco to study coffee roasting from Alfred Peet himself. Little did Mr. Peet know that within 15 years these students of roasting would buy his company and give him a nice retirement fund.
Heckler Associates worked on the first Starbucks store design in a space not far from the current Pike Place Market location in Seattle. The exterior sign was a huge, solid piece of 6-inch-thick cedar that the installer worried would pull the building down. The building did come down six years later, but not because of the sign.
When the original building was sold and demolished, Starbucks moved to its current location and most of the interior fixtures were simply moved to the new shop. Twenty-five years later, we designed and wrote all the signage surrounding the commemoration of the Pike Place Market store as the original Starbucks.
Heckler Associates modified the Starbucks logo at a few points in the company's history. The first time was when we were designing the first Starbucks delivery trucks. The logo was huge—and so were the mermaid's breasts. We re-drew her hairstyle to cover them up. As Starbucks expanded across the country, the number of letters from women complaining about the siren's risqué pose grew, and we made further changes. For those who knew her back in the day, she sometimes seems a shadow of her siren self, but we love her anyway.
I was getting some flack about the mermaid looking pregnant. I dismissed it by saying maybe, maybe not. Is she or isn't she? It was such an interesting thing that I drew her belly button to appear as a question mark. It remained that way for a year or two and we got rid of it when repro effects made it appear stronger than we liked. You can see this logo version on the sign hanging above the sidewalk at the Pike Place Market Starbucks.
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