Coffee cup stamp for cafes. 5 key tips.

A coffee cup stamp is certainly one of the more popular uses for a custom rubber stamp at the moment as many cafes and restaurants move away to promoting their coffee supplier’s brand, and focus on the importance of promoting their own. Coffee cup stamps can be a great way to further extend the reach of your brand outside of your restaurant or cafe, so your customers do their part in (free!) advertising when walking down the street. We’re often asked for tips and tricks to ensure the best outcome for a coffee cup stamp, below are our top 5:

Tip #1: Keep the design simple

It’s tempting to try to put a lot of information about your business on to a coffee cup stamp, such as ABN or address… however in this case, less really is more. You may decide to not even include your full business name, but simply have a component of your logo such as an icon or simple picture featured on the stamp. Try to focus on keeping the design impactful, and not use too many fine details.

Tip #2: Select the right size coffee cup stamp

A stamp that’s too large can result in the design not fitting on the smallest standard takeaway cup, or the design just feeling crowded. Conversely, if the stamp is too small it can feel lost. We recommend aiming for a design that works well within a 5cm x 5cm square. For Woodruff and Co stamps, that’s a ‘medium’ sized stamp.

Tip #3: Use ink suitable for stamping on to non-treated cardboard

There’s a lot of options out there with stamp ink pads to choose from, but most fall in to the categories of either dye ink pads or pigment ink pads. Dye ink pads dry matte on coffee cups, however they are not waterproof, and if the water content is too high, they may bleed on more porous coffee cups. Pigment ink pads dry on top of cardboard or paper with design being more raised form the surface and generally thicker/richer colours, but are not often used on coffee cups.
After a process of testing 50 or so ink pads, and the ones we sell and recommend for a coffee cup stamp are a dye ink pad which uses an acid-free quick-drying archival ink. Although these ink pads are not waterproof, they are smear resistant, with minimal bleeding on most blank coffee cup surfaces.

Tip #4: Learn from other’s success (or fails!)

If your needing some inspiration for your coffee cup stamp, a great resource is Instagram as many uses tend to post images they’re really proud of. A Google image search will also give you a lot of food for thought!

Tip #5: Mix it up

Above all, this is an opportunity to have some fun with your brand, and doesn’t need to be treated as a high-involvement decision that you’re stuck with for the next 20 years. You may want to consider having more than one design to keep it interesting for your customers, or simply rotate in a new design after using for a couple of months.