While most ready-to-drink coffees try to stand out with sugar, milk, or a long list of added flavours, Naked Coffee has taken the opposite approach. We spoke with co-founder Sasha Ódry about how the idea came to life, the role design plays in shaping the brand, and why they believe simplicity can be just as eye-catching on the shelf.
The cold brew market in Hungary is still relatively young — what convinced you to launch this project now?
We're not worried about the market being young, because we don't want our product to be understood within the limits of the cold brew niche. The ready-to-drink coffee market is huge, and the market for plain black coffee is enormous too. Naked Cold Brew Coffee is, first and foremost, a pure black coffee in ready-to-drink form, created to give black coffee drinkers the option to buy it off store shelves too. We achieved this in a form free of milk, sugar, and flavorings — genuinely refreshing. By the way, if we manage to reach nationwide availability and, through that, get the chance to introduce consumers to the benefits of cold brew, we're confident we'll be able to meaningfully shape the market's development.
Naked Coffee's visual identity is unusually and refreshingly clean in a category where many brands try to stand out with loud colours and over-communicated packaging. Why did you choose a more restrained aesthetic, and what do you want the design to communicate about the product even before the first sip?
We really like the phrase "refreshingly clean," because that's exactly our product's goal too: to strip away everything unnecessary and offer a clean, (high-quality) yet powerful source of caffeine. Two things mattered most to us while developing the design. First, we wanted it to be clear at first glance that we think about this market completely differently than the big companies do. The goal was to stand out on the shelf from far away. We believe that in a room where everyone is shouting, the one who stays quiet draws the most attention. Second, we wanted the design to faithfully represent the "Naked mindset" – letting go of unnecessary things. If we had to sum up in one word what we want the design to communicate (even before the first sip), it would be honesty.
How much does the "naked" philosophy — stripping away the unnecessary, purity — reflect your own lifestyles? Is this a deliberately constructed brand narrative, or is it fully authentic to you as well?
For a startup, we have quite a lot of founders, and maybe that's exactly what makes it interesting: everyone genuinely connects with a slightly different part of the Naked philosophy. We'd call it partly authentic, since we built the brand starting from ourselves — but in reality it's a brand narrative to which everyone added their own value, and which we then continued to shape through deliberate decisions.
The cold brew process is significantly longer than traditional coffee brewing — what does the production process look like in practice, and what capacity are you working with?
We can't give away all our secrets, but we'd highlight two things. First, we work with great partners, together with whom we found a solution to every problem that came up, and after many long months we managed to make the product meet all our key requirements: consisting of just two ingredients, being 100% natural, stable, having a long shelf life, and containing a high, exclusively natural caffeine content. We also had ambitious plans regarding capacity, so we're happy to say we honestly don't know where our capacity ceiling would even be.
Who would you recommend Naked Cold Brew to most?
Anyone who wants to buy caffeine in a store while knowing exactly what they're putting into their body every day. Taking that thought further, we'd also highlight people who want to enjoy the real things in life. Unfortunately, these days many of us have gotten to the point where only something pumped up with sugar, sweeteners, or flavor enhancers can grab our attention anymore. We believe, though, that life is far more enjoyable once we cut out these artificial sources of pleasure and relearn how to appreciate simple things.
Was there a specific event or personal story that inspired the creation of the brand?
It's more deliberate decisions than inspiration behind the brand, but launching a joint venture with five people requires an extremely high level of trust. None of this could have happened if we hadn't spent our university years drinking beers together and building those friendships. If we had to point to one specific moment, it would be a long conversation during a car ride home from a road trip with friends, after which it became clear to everyone that we were ready to go all in.
Many specialty coffee brands build primarily on professional credibility. How do you think about the balance between product quality, visual culture, and the lifestyle dimension?
We don't want to compete with the specialty market's professional depth and craftsmanship. In such a diverse market serving such specific needs, we don't think that would even be realistic. In fact, independent of Naked, we ourselves also enjoy a good fresh specialty coffee experience just the same. We don't see the revolution as creating a limited-availability, handcrafted product, or launching a specialty coffee that meets every professional benchmark. We have a different vision for the future of ready-to-consume products. We can also hint that it's not just coffee we have our sights on. Whatever Naked product we're talking about, we consider product quality, visual culture, and the lifestyle dimension equally important. And in every market we enter, our goal is to be better than our competitors in all three areas.
Your design feels both international and timeless. Was it a deliberate goal for Naked Coffee to be understood not just as a Hungarian brand, but within a broader, global design and coffee culture?
We're glad that came through — you're reading it right. The Naked brand wants to offer a solution to a global problem: we want to bring functional products back to their true form. With today's technology, it's now possible to create well-preserved, completely natural products for store shelves. Even so, in this segment we're still used to intense, extremely sweet drinks. In many cases, you could say this borders on addiction, so it's not worth waiting for current market players to voluntarily stop catering to it on their own. We constantly come across 10–20-line, hard-to-decipher ingredient lists on store shelves, while week after week the advice on what's healthy and what isn't keeps changing. We want the Naked logo to represent the dissolving of that uncertainty. If you quickly need a particular function off the shelf — say, caffeine — know that Naked delivers it without compromise, stripped back 100% to nature's own form.
If you had to describe the brand in 3 words, what would it be?
Honest, bold, pure
Where will people be able to find you in the future — what events, what stores will you be present at?
We're a little biased, but we think a Naked Cold Brew comes in handy in a lot of life situations, so we want it to be available in as many places as possible. We're proud that we now work with cafés and gourmet stores as well. Even better, we've managed to secure shelf space with partners like Manna ABC, Roni ABC, Wolt Market, and Culinaris. We feel this brings us one step closer to our goal of making a quality coffee experience available on the go too. Our next goal is to reach conscious shoppers in drugstores as well, and of course we've also got our eye on the grab-and-go fridges in hypermarkets.
Collaborations are an important part of the Naked world. We work with partners who think about community, culture, and sport the same way we do — that's how we built our collaborations with Running Latte Club and HABITS Cult. You can also catch us at our own coffee raves this summer, at HACHI and at the LINDOS picnics. Coffee raves are already becoming more and more popular abroad, and we're working to help more people discover this form of entertainment here at home too. We believe fun doesn't have to be tied exclusively to alcohol. A (or a few) good coffee, good music, and good company bring people together during the day just as well. Beyond sports, our goal is also to be present in more and more collaborations in the creative and cultural space. Stay tuned.
