How the agency Young Jerks built the Mr Black brand
Part serendipity, part genius, and a founder that was prepared to be provocative.
Welcome to a new features series where we interview the brand and design studios behind the bev/alc brands we (and you) love.
Young Jerks is the rare agency that makes a signature style feel like a service rather than a constraint. Their work occupies the space between working-class utility and premium refinement - a signature ‘retro-cool’ aesthetic that has essentially become the blueprint for modern packaging. Every brand Young Jerks touches is unmistakably theirs, yet also entirely driven by the client’s needs.
Made up of a team of designers, illustrators and letterers across Brooklyn and Philly, Young Jerks has become a go-to agency for high-end spirits and craft labels (think Pa’lante, Parch, Drowned Lands, and more.) They’re also known as the team behind the identity and packaging for Mr Black – the coffee liqueur brand that transformed the category before being acquired by Diageo in 2022.
We think a huge part of Mr Black’s success is down to formative work carried out by Young Jerks, as well as the brand development they led for ten years. Let’s talk about how they did it.
HOW THE STORY STARTED
Young Jerks originally met Mr Black founder Tom Baker nearly a decade ago. The business had already seen success in its home country of Australia, and as they planned their expansion overseas, they wanted to solidify the brand.
“We had a meeting at 9 o’clock in the morning at a coffee shop, and Tom pulled out a bottle of liqueur and made us drink it,” says Young Jerks co-founder Dan Cassaro.
At the time, there was “nothing but bad vibes” around coffee liqueur, according to him. Drinkers didn’t have positive associations, so Mr Black needed to hit them with a one-two punch: first, grab them with the branding, second, overcome preconceived notions of what coffee liqueur tastes like.
SOMETIMES THE SOLUTION IS SIMPLE
Getting over those negative perceptions obviously required exceptional liquid, but it also needed something else: compelling, eye-grabbing, unexpected branding.
When it comes to brand-building, people love to backwards-rationalize and over-intellectualize. But the strategy for Mr Black was simple: make it look cool, get people to try it.
“We were just trusting our gut,” says Young Jerks co-founder Dan Christofferson. “We had a specific idea of the texture of typography, and we wanted to make an impact on those kinds of things … since then I think we’ve developed really specific ideas and philosophies around packaging and branding, but it was helpful in the first few years [of working with Mr Black] to trust our instincts around culture and alcohol.”
The brand also had to be really clear as it pushed into the US. The audience there loved cold brew, says Dan Cassaro, so that messaging had to go front and centre.
At the time, Mr Black was using a stock bottle but Young Jerks added a custom die-cut label – that would ultimately become iconic for the brand – to get that message across. They also sprinkled in some of the “weird, esoteric, arcane, mythological” imagery that the agency is known and loved for, and that Mr Black came to be associated with.
ARCANE VISUALS
When Mr Black later developed a custom bottle, Young Jerks embedded even more of that visual vernacular into the packaging – some of it only revealed once people started drinking.
“They let us hide open and closed eyes, and an oracle on the back,” says Dan Christofferson, who made those illustrations. “We started hiding that language throughout the brand. It became a cool treasure hunt for the brand as it grew, and people could find that stuff and continue the brand story.”
And once Mr Black had this “treasure chest” of imagery? The copy wrote itself. For example, the brand’s ‘sweetheart of the night’ tagline was originally a casual sentence written for a merch collection, but founder Tom loved it, and it started appearing in other places like the website, and in the Instagram account of Mr Black’s brand ambassador.
“There’s this alchemy that happens between whoever’s building these assets, and the person who’s executing them and knowing how to use them, and that is really important,” says Dan Cassaro.
GOOD BRANDING FEELS ‘INEVITABLE’
Young Jerks were agency of record for Mr Black for a whole decade, and in that time they tested various brand and label executions. They explored several directions – making it feel more like a Brooklyn coffee brand, for example, or leaning into the codes of old patent medicine.
Ultimately, however, they followed their instincts and chose whichever path felt “inevitable”. “We’ve gone through three or four fully-invested-our-hearts-into new brand and new labels,” says Dan Christofferson. “But such a huge part of a brand is just repetition, and doing the same thing over and over again until it locks in.”
Inevitability. Repetition. They’re not the sexy words agencies often use when talking about branding, but they’re the things that really work. And there’s something compelling about describing the right branding as ‘inevitable’ – it feels right, it feels instinctive, and somehow that was the place it was always going to get to.
“There’s this alchemy that happens between whoever’s building these assets, and the person who’s executing them and knowing how to use them, and that is really important,” says Dan Cassaro.
GREAT BRANDS DON’T EXPLAIN THEMSELVES
To build a brand like Mr Black, you have to be a bit provocative. You have to trust your brand agency, you have to let them do their thing, and then you have to run with it – as far as you possibly can.
“The best founders have this objectivity, where they can look at their brand - which is so personal – and be able to see it how someone on the outside might see it,” says Dan Cassaro.
“That gives them extra insight. And when you’re able to do that, you give yourself more permission to build a specific type of confidence into the brand including the copy that you’re writing. You wouldn’t believe how many founders are so scared that they feel the need to explain everything, and then a lot of campaigns and even copywriting falls so flat.
“You have to be brave enough to go in there and be like: this is who we are. We’re confident. Maybe a bit funny. Maybe this doesn’t make that much sense, but it’s provocative. And I think you see that again and again in successful brands that people have an emotional connection with.”
With Mr Black, Young Jerks didn’t just design a label or a brand; they built a toolbox to empower the founder for years to come. They proved that confidence and true creative partnership are the most powerful forces for market disruption.
The New Rules is a labor of love by nihilo.agency
Looking for consulting/design support for your brand? Email us! hi@nihilo.agency
Support us by:
- Subscribing
- Sharing
- Inviting us to speak at your conference or event on branding/bev/alc/fun