GAWE

The Brief

GAWE is a luxury cafe out of Saudi Arabia, built for Riyadh and Jeddah with an eye on Dubai. It sits at the intersection of two worlds its founders live in: old Mayfair club culture and affluent sport, tennis, racket, golf. They came to us to build the brand from the ground up, from strategy to identity to the full art direction of how it shows up in the world.

The Challenge

The Gulf has no shortage of expensive cafes. Most of them read the same way: minimal, cold, trend-led, interchangeable once the espresso is gone. GAWE needed to feel older than it is. A cafe that behaves like a members club that has been there for decades, without the fake heritage crest and without the theatrical Saudi cliches. Second problem: the audience. Athletes of affluent sport are used to being sold performance. GAWE is not a performance brand, it is a lifestyle one. The work had to speak in codes to a customer who does not want to be shouted at, and still make the sporting world feel native rather than borrowed.

What We Did

We positioned GAWE as a private club that happens to serve coffee. Ruler archetype, Creator underneath. Nothing about it chases the cafe category, it sets its own tone with restraint and hierarchy. The idea we built everything on: a Mayfair club transplanted to Saudi, with the court and the clubhouse as its natural habitat. Vintage tennis, golf bags, driving gloves, wool cable knits, brass and patina and saddle leather. That gave the brand a world instead of a look. Coffee is the ritual, the club is the setting, sport is the reason you are there. From that we built the strategy, the naming system in Arabic and English, the monogram and full identity, the pattern language, packaging across the drinks range, a merchandise and lifestyle line covering luggage, duffles, caps, racket grips and gloves, and the complete art direction and photography world that ties it together. "Fuel Your Finest Game" became the line that connects the cup to the court.

Packaging

The drinkware is where the brand does most of its public work, so we treated the cup as the club uniform. Double wall cups in heritage green with the tonal monogram repeat and the crest in champagne gold. A premium coffee pouch in the same pattern, a two-cup carrier in tonal stripe, a ceramic matcha bowl with the crest debossed, and an espresso set in plain white and black so the pattern never fights the ritual. Every piece is tactile, dual language, and finished so it reads as an object rather than disposable packaging.

Photography

Grainy film, golden hour, deep shadow, painted studio backdrops in the same green as the identity. The rules: nothing lit brightly, nothing shot flat, everything either mid-ritual or mid-stillness. We shot three worlds. Studio still life, product staged like a heritage catalogue against canvas. Court and clubhouse portraits, cable knits and cream shorts on a bench, gold Cartier on a wrist gripping a racket. And the automotive world, vintage Porsche and Cadillac interiors in olive leather with the packaging placed like it belongs to whoever owns the car. Faces are calm and unsmiling. The dogs in the director chairs are the one wink, and it works because everything around it is played straight.

Interiors

We took the club out of Mayfair and built it as a cafe. Walnut panelling, brass rails, herringbone floors, oxblood leather booths and small marble tables. Lighting stays low and warm, sconces and picture lights only, so the room sits in the same shadow as the photography. Framed prints, bean jars on open shelves, cups stacked on the machine, all staged to look accumulated rather than installed. The layout is built for stillness, not laptops. The room tells you how long to stay and how quiet to be, which is the brand said in wood and leather instead of type.

Marketing

Rollout is built around "Fuel Your Finest Game," a line that carries across every key visual without repeating a single format. Campaign frames run on Instagram as codes, not captions: a wrist and a racket grip, a cup on a paddle, a duffle in the boot of a 993. The merchandise line does the media buying for us. Luggage, golf bags, caps and gloves put the brand on the course and in the car, which is exactly where the audience lives, and the cafe becomes the place they come back to.

The Result

GAWE now owns a world that no other cafe in the region can copy without looking like a costume. The monogram, the pattern, the type, the green and gold, the film grain and the sporting props all point at one idea, and that idea is old money at rest. The system stretches from a coffee cup to a golf bag to a full campaign frame without a single weak link, and every piece of it feels lived in rather than launched. That is what makes it read as legacy on day one.