Brand Strategy · 2024
Cinder & Co
One hospitality group, four rooms, a single voice that still lets each space speak for itself.
- Client
- Cinder & Co
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
- Year
- 2024
- Services
- Brand strategy, visual identity, creative direction
Three restaurants and a members’ bar, opened over seven years by the same two owners, had slowly become four brands. Staff could not explain the family. Regulars could. The work was to write that down, then give it a system that would survive a fifth room.
The brief
Cinder (fire cooking, Fitzroy), Low Tide (seafood, St Kilda), The Mill (daytime, Collingwood) and Room Four (members, above Cinder). Shared suppliers, shared wine list, no shared language. A hotel group had come knocking. The identity had to be ready to travel without becoming a chain.
The work
Strategy first: Cinder & Co is a house of rooms, not a restaurant brand with extensions. Each room keeps its name, its type, its own small mark. The parent is felt in paper, in the way a bill is folded, in a single charcoal that appears on every matchbox.
We built a colour and cloth library from the actual rooms — plaster, ash, wet stone, a yellow that only happens at 4pm in The Mill. Menus, uniforms and a quiet site that treats reservations as hospitality, not conversion.
Guests started saying “Cinder & Co” out loud. That was the sentence we had been missing. Jonah Hale, Co-founder
What changed
Membership at Room Four doubled in six months without a campaign. The hotel conversation is still open — on the studio’s terms. A fifth room is drawn. The system already knows what to do with it.
