Smörgåsbord sharpens Coaltown Coffee’s story of post-industrial purpose

The Brand Identity: Ammanford, in South West Wales, was built on anthracite coal – ‘Black Gold’ that once fuelled lives and livelihoods. When the last colliery closed in 2003, Ammanford lost its sense of purpose. Coaltown set out to reignite that pride, creating a new kind of Black Gold – coffee. In 2018, the machines began to hum once more, not in the mines, but in Coaltown’s Roastery.

In 2026, Amsterdam and Cardiff-based studio Smörgåsbord were asked on board to refine the brand – both in terms of its strategy and identity – in preparation for Coaltown’s next phase of growth. Since launching the brand in 2018, Scott James, Coaltown’s founder, had led its evolution in-house, but recognised the need to refine and elevate the offer to stay ahead. ”By his own admission, the narrative and tone of voice lacked clarity, and the identity needed crafting,” explains Dylan Griffith, Co-founder & Creative Director at Smörgåsbord.

“Our first task, then, was to define and refine Coaltown’s – already genuine – story, shaping it for both its current audience and the one it’s growing into. From there, the right design decisions followed naturally.” Heavy-handed change could have cost Coaltown the loyalty it had spent a decade earning, so retaining a slab serif was settled early. Coaltown’s logotype had long leaned on a serviceable but unremarkable slab serif and the search for a replacement led Smörgåsbord to Successor, drawn by Tim Ripper for Commercial Type and released in 2023.

Griffith’s team took the Medium Bold weight as its base and customised the letterforms with small nicks that echo the brand’s pick-and-shovel marque and lend the logotype a subtle sense of depth. The choice was grounded in lineage as much as form. Slab serifs dominated poster design from the Industrial Revolution through to the early twentieth century, when the Welsh coal industry was at its peak, and Successor itself is a contemporary interpretation of the nineteenth-century English slab serif historically known as Egyptian or Antique. Griffith is candid about how few strong options exist in the category.

“As odd as it sounds, there aren’t many strong slab serifs out there compared to sans, serif or flared serif. Beyond the classics like Lubalin Graph and Rockwell – which would have felt a little dated in this context – most alternatives lean towards Clarendon or feel either overly stylised, or worse, like a free download,” he says. A quieter footnote ran through the research: the RIZLA wordmark, whose original factory opened in 1940 near Pontypridd in the heart of the Welsh mining belt.

That detail never reached the client, but it confirmed the typographic direction had the right geography behind it. Successor’s breadth allowed the entire identity to run on a single type family. Its 16 weights and cuts carry the brand across packaging, editorial and motion, and Smörgåsbord’s guidelines define how hierarchy and pace are generated within the family, when to use all caps versus sentence case, and when an outlined version can be introduced for expressive effect.

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The article discusses a significant rebranding effort that highlights the importance of narrative and identity in the coffee industry, which is relevant and actionable for brand strategy professionals, though the concepts presented are not entirely groundbreaking.