Kelly La Belle

Our client at Starbucks wanted to create a series of animated videos for their company onboarding process. These videos are shown to new baristas and corporate employees as a part of their employment training. The client wanted to address some serious (and occasionally boring) subjects in these videos and requested an element to spice them up and make them more fun to watch.

We created the bean characters as a whimsical way to deliver more sensitive information in a way that gets the point across, but doesn't cause anxiety for the client's new recruits. Video subjects include an introduction to Starbucks Stock options (Bean Stalk), and training videos on disaster preparedness for scenarios such as blizzards, earthquakes, fires, or active shooters.

The bean characters ended up being extremely popular, leading to spin off projects including a PowerPoint template with new usable characters, a library of different bean characters for trade show collateral, and multiple printed posters for the baristas.