- Starbucks left Russia by selling its more than 125 stores in May to an alliance of Russian businessmen.
- The Russians renamed the brand Stars Coffee, whose logo is strikingly similar to that of Starbucks.
- The redesign took only a month, they said.
Although the logo and many of the menus are very similar to those of the US chain Starbucks, the owners of Stars Coffee say that it is a different brand.
Stars Coffee, the company that took over Starbucks restaurants in Russia, opened its first point of sale in Moscow in mid-August.
Stars Coffee sells frappuccinoswrites the name of the customers on the glasses and has a logo that blushes the design world for its similarity to that of Starbucks.
Starbucks closed its more than 125 stores in Russia between March and April 2022, after the start of the armed conflict between that country and Ukraine.
In May, meanwhile, he announced that he was leaving Vladimir Putin’s country following the impulse of many other Western companies that withdrew, such as McDonald’s, Zara and H&M.
In the case of Starbucks, the Seattle-born company sold its stores to an alliance between businessman Anton Pinskiy, rapper Timur Yunusov and a company called Sindika Company.
The stores were renamed Stars Coffee and the first one reopened in downtown Moscow last week.
Stars Coffee is “a totally different brand”
“Starbucks walked away with its formula, technology and raw materials,” he told The Wall Street Journal rapper Yunusov. And he added: “In its place came a totally different brand.”
Pinskiy, meanwhile, in an interview with BBCmade similar comments, suggesting that there were no similarities between the brand logos beyond their circular shape.
The Starbucks logo features a mermaid wearing a star-adorned crown, while the Stars Coffee logo shows a woman wearing a traditional Russian headdress with a star.
the logo of Star’s Coffeein fact, looks much more like an earlier Starbucks logo, the one debuted by the American brand in the early 1990s.
In that representation, the mermaid was inside a circle and the text said “Starbucks Coffee”.
Pinksy told Russian media outlet Sostav in early August that he planned to make the new coffee company’s name as close to the original as possible, and had considered calling it “Starbox” or “Stars”.
He also told her that the menus will continue to include sandwiches, salads, cakes and desserts, but with different recipes.
In addition, he had anticipated that the new chain it would carry on the Starbucks tradition of writing customers’ names on their coffee cups.
The development of the new brand took a month of design work
Stars Coffee told The Wall Street Journal that it took them “just a month” to develop the new brand.
Stars Coffee’s strategy is not similar to that of “Russian McDonald’s” rebranded as “Vkusno & tochka”whose logo is completely different from that of the American hamburger chain.
Likewise, it is being successful, since according to its executive director, it sold 120 thousand hamburgers only on the day of its inauguration.
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