Torani believes in “Flavor for All, Opportunity for All.” To bring that belief to life, they partnered with Glitter Cat Barista, an organization working to make the coffee industry more inclusive. At the center of it was a story we knew we needed to tell.
It’s easy for a brand to say it cares about inclusion, opportunity, and community. It’s much harder to make people believe it.
Torani wanted to build awareness around its purpose-driven work in the coffee industry without creating another corporate message about its values. The answer wasn’t to talk more about Torani. It was to tell the story of someone putting those values into action.
That person was Veronica Grimm, founder of Glitter Cat Barista. Growing up in a small Wisconsin town, Veronica felt out of place. Years later, after becoming the most authentic version of herself - a proud queer trans woman - she decided to create the kind of community she wished had existed for her.
Glitter Cat Barista became a place where disabled, neurodivergent, gender-nonconforming, LGBTQIAP+ people and people of color could compete, learn, connect, and find their place within the coffee industry. Torani wasn't the hero of the story. Veronica was. And that made Torani's support mean something.
Ready State, our partner agency on this project, came to us with Veronica's voice and an early visual direction. Our job was to build a world around her story without overpowering it. We developed a hand-drawn visual language that could move between Veronica's memories, identity, experiences, and the colorful community she ultimately created.
The finished film included roughly 30 scenes and seven characters, with hundreds of custom illustrations brought to life through subtle animation. Rather than constantly calling attention to the animation, movement was intentionally restrained. Veronica's voice remained at the center.
and how the story was used in a story ecosystem
The 3.5-minute animated film became part of Torani's larger Puremade Stories platform, highlighting mission-aligned organizations creating opportunities within the café industry. The story could live as a standalone film while also supporting Torani's broader efforts across web, social, email, internal communications, and foodservice partnerships.
based on trust, not just metrics
Trust built through someone else's story. Instead of asking audiences to believe a statement about Torani's values, the campaign showed those values through the people and organizations Torani chooses to support.
The broader Puremade Stories campaign generated:
3.71% Click-through rate to web. 2:20 Average view time. ~56% Email open rate
But the bigger result was something harder to measure. Torani didn't have to tell people what it stood for. Veronica's story showed them.
The visual approach started with highly stylized, hand-drawn exploration before evolving into characters with more realistic human proportions.
From there, we created an animatic to establish the rhythm of Veronica's story before illustrating roughly 30 individual scenes.
Once those illustrations were complete, we focused on small, purposeful movements that gave the world life without distracting from the narration.
Music and sound design were treated the same way: supporting the emotional arc rather than competing with it. The result was a film that felt handcrafted, personal, colorful, and unmistakably Veronica.
with us.A strong partnership between organization and studio is the crux of great creation. We listen. We ask questions. We seek out the story hiding beneath the surface. Then we bring it to life through creative documentation.
