BoneFrog Coffee Company

Team Brand Guide

The standard, applied.
Social · Images · Website · Email.
Companion to the v4 Brand Document · Built against the locked rules
00 · How to use this guide

The Brand Document is the why. This is the how.

The v4 Brand Document sets the standard. This guide turns it into daily work across the four channels every team touches. Read your section before you ship. One filter sits over all of it, and every output passes through it first.

Is this worthy of the people we are honoring? If it is not, it does not ship.
01 · Voice in practice

Specific over evocative. Concrete over inflated.

Short sentences. Specific facts. No volume. When we speak about the fallen we are reverent and specific: names, ranks, dates, the story straight. Everywhere else, dry humor is allowed. The brand never punches down, never trades on the mission for a joke, and never tries too hard.

Always

  • Spell it BoneFrog, capital B and capital F, every time.
  • Use Veteran-Owned and Operated. Add "Company" only when "company" is not already in the line.
  • State the fact and stop. Let the reader decide.
  • Use commas, periods, colons, semicolons, parentheses.

Never

  • Em dashes. Anywhere. On any channel.
  • Exclamation points, emojis, "warriors" or "heroes" as filler.
  • "Join the family," "welcome to the tribe," urgency tactics.
  • Founder self-aggrandizement or marketing-school language.

The tribute two-layer rule (the social landmine)

This is the rule most likely to be broken on social, so it gets its own line. The brand honors on two layers, and they do not mix.

If a social caption pairs a product shot with an individual's name and story, it has crossed layers. Split it: the memorial post remembers the man, the product post honors the mission. They can run on different days. They cannot be the same post.
02 · Visual system

Midnight. Brass. Cream. Nothing promotional.

Six tokens carry the entire brand. Charcoal and black are equal partners with navy. Brass is the accent, used sparingly. Cream is breathing room and never pure white. Rose is Sisterhood-only and does not move.

Midnight
#0B2044
Navy
#1F3354
Charcoal
#14171D
Cream
#F1ECDF
Brass
#B68B2E
Rose · Sisterhood
#7A3040

Section rhythm

Pages alternate dark and light. Dark caps at 20 to 30 percent of any page. Never two dark adjacent. Never three of the same background in a row. Hero is always dark. Final CTA is always dark. Rose counts as dark and stays inside Sisterhood pages only. The rhythm is the brand pacing: emotional peaks in dark, informational rest in cream.

Eyebrows and dividers

03 · Typography

One serif that carries weight. One sans that steps back.

Libre Baskerville carries everything that matters.

Display · headings · bag names · the brand name

Libre Baskerville is the foundation: a craftsman's serif that carries history without costuming itself as historical. Outfit handles supporting UI and eyebrows. Crimson Pro carries long-form editorial. That is the entire system.

04 · Photography & images

Two modes. Never blended.

Studio · Product

  • Dark surfaces, dramatic low light, intentional shadows.
  • Bag, mug, apparel, gear: same treatment, same standard.
  • The product is revealed, not presented.

Natural · Story

  • Fire circle, small boat, empty gym at dawn, coastline.
  • A point of view, not a catalog shot.
  • This is the work from the Story Behind the Bag shoots with Tim.

What both modes share

Color review is a hard gate, not a courtesy. A blended-register image (a studio product dropped into a warm natural scene, or a natural shot color-graded like a catalog) fails review and does not post.
05 · Who we speak to

Three tiers. Every post answers one question: who is this for?

Acquisition is the constraint, not retention. The subscriber lifetime is already top-decile. Most current content is built for Tier 1. The growth is in Tiers 2 and 3, so the calendar deliberately allocates to all three.

Tier 1 · The core

The veteran / vet-adjacent man

Male, 40 to 60, near a military metro. High loyalty once earned, low churn. The man the brand was built for.

Platform Facebook, email, IG feed
Content Founder, memorial, adrenaline
CTA Subscribe, the long relationship
Tier 2 · The growth

The spouse & gift-buyer

Often the actual purchase initiator. Buys for birthdays, Father's Day, Veterans Day, deployment care packages.

Platform Instagram, Pinterest, email
Content Gift framing, community, Sisterhood
CTA Gift, bundle, first-order welcome
Tier 3 · The reach

The civilian patriot

No direct military connection, strong affinity for the values. The scale opportunity, won by going deeper on authenticity.

Platform TikTok, YouTube, Reels
Content Memorial, story, the why
CTA Follow, watch, learn the mission
06 · Channel matrix

Platforms are pipes. The content is the asset.

Do not build a separate strategy per platform. Build one piece of content and cut it for each pipe. The table sets the format, cadence, caption length, and CTA discipline per channel. Captions stay short everywhere; commerce CTAs live in email, not in memorial or story posts.

ChannelTierPrimary formatCadenceCaptionCTA discipline
Instagram feed1 & 24:5 stills, carousels3 to 4 / week1 to 3 linesSoft on product, none on memorial
Instagram Reels2 & 39:16 vertical video2 to 3 / week1 to 2 linesFollow / watch, no urgency
Instagram Stories1 & 29:16, behind the scenesDaily, low effortMinimalLink sticker to relevant page
TikTok39:16 vertical video3 to 5 / week1 lineNone. Earn the follow
YouTube long-form1 & 316:9, Tim on camera1 / weekFull descriptionSubscribe, link in description
YouTube Shorts39:16 cut from long-form2 to 3 / week1 lineNone. Drive to long-form
Facebook1Native video, stills3 to 4 / week2 to 4 linesShop / subscribe, owned audience
LinkedInB2BStills, founder posts1 / week3 to 5 linesWholesale / corporate gifting
Pinterest22:3 pins, gift guidesWeekly batchKeyword captionPin to product / gift page
X1 & 3Founder voice, textOptional1 to 2 linesNone
Standardize the plumbing so the metrics in section 11 work: one consistent bio and link-in-bio across platforms, and a UTM tag on every link out. Without UTMs there is no honest CAC-by-channel.
07 · The content engine

One shoot feeds everything.

A quarterly location shoot (Tim on camera) plus weekly Tim clips produce creative for every pipe at once: paid, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube long-form and Shorts, Pinterest, email graphics, B2B decks, affiliate assets. The weekly video you are already producing for feeds, Stories, YouTube, and TikTok is the same asset, cut four ways. Production cost is lower and output is many times higher. That is how the brand beats scale with discipline instead of budget.

01 · Capture

Shoot

Quarterly location day, plus 2 to 3 short Tim clips off every Friday call.

02 · Master

One asset

Edit a clean horizontal master and pull the stills. Color reviewed before anything moves.

03 · Cut

Four ratios

16:9 for YouTube, 9:16 for Reels / TikTok / Shorts / Stories, 4:5 for feed, 2:3 for Pinterest.

04 · Schedule

Distribute

Drop into the weekly calendar against the channel matrix. Same story, every pipe.

Tim's voice is the part nobody can copy

Every veteran coffee brand claims authenticity. BoneFrog has a Navy SEAL founder who is in the work. Tim on camera, Tim in emails, Tim in founder content. Every Friday call should produce two to three short clips for the following week. That single habit feeds the engine more than any other.

08 · Website

Command first. Craft and story underneath.

The homepage opens dark, high-contrast, cinematic: one image or sequence that stops the visitor before a single word. No carousel, no promotional banners. Navigation is minimal and confident. As the visitor moves down, the register shifts from command to craft: product pages precise and considered, bag stories given the space they deserve.

09 · Email & SMS

Reverent where it remembers. Dry where it sells.

Email and SMS run on Omnisend (both channels). Shopify handles transactional email only. Subscriptions run on Loop. The brand voice does not change between a memorial send and a product send; the posture does. Mission sends carry no Add to Cart. Commerce sends are direct and specific.

Founder letters

Tim's letters use the vintage founder-letter format: his voice, his signature, no CTA, no Add to Cart. The September 11 letter is the model. These are brand-layer, so names are allowed.

Welcome series & the discount architecture (locked)

SMS pings

Short, specific, no urgency theater. One clear reason to tap. SMS carries the same voice rules as everything else: no exclamation points, no em dashes, BoneFrog spelled correctly.

10 · Pre-publish QA

Nothing posts until it clears the gate.

Run every deliverable, on every channel, through this list before it ships.

Approvals batch to the Friday weekly call. No async one-offs unless a P1 is genuinely blocking. Tim writes and approves every tribute story; all design changes go through Tim.
11 · What we measure

Measure what matters, not what is loud.

Followers, likes, and engagement rate are vanity metrics until they convert. The Friday call reviews the numbers that move the business, not the numbers that feel good.

Track

  • New customers acquired (Meta + Shopify)
  • CAC by channel (this is why UTMs are mandatory)
  • Subscription conversion rate
  • Lifetime value by cohort
  • Total revenue, year over year

Do not steer by

  • Follower count as a goal
  • Likes and comments in isolation
  • Engagement rate with no conversion behind it
  • Reach for its own sake

The constraint is acquisition. Every content decision is evaluated against one question: does this bring a new, right-fit buyer into the funnel, or keep the right ones close? If it does neither, it is not earning its place.

Build something true, and trust that the right people find it.
BoneFrog Coffee Company · Team Brand Guide