# Shiftie brand brief

- **Status:** Approved v1.1
- **Approved direction:** Pacific Modern
- **Canonical domain:** `shiftie.me`
- **Contact:** `info@shiftie.me`
- **Last updated:** 2026-08-03

## Brand in one line

Shiftie is a venue-controlled staff-perk system that gives hospitality teams an easy way to issue, redeem, and reconcile shift drinks, meals, and recognition.

## The value proposition

For venues, the real value is policy control, less leakage, employee goodwill, and a clean record the back office can reconcile.

For employees, Shiftie makes familiar hospitality perks feel legitimate, celebratory, and frictionless. Employees are always free.

For brand partners, Shiftie is a respectful way to support a real employee benefit and build recognition with the hospitality professionals who taste, recommend, and serve the product.

## Brand idea: House Pour Club

"House Pour Club" is the emotional wrapper around the product. It turns a control system into a small moment of belonging. It should feel like a matchbook from a beloved neighborhood bar: tactile, specific, a little transportive, and never corporate.

The product is operationally serious. The brand is warm enough that employees actually want to use it.

## Product truths the brand must preserve

- A regular Shiftie is generated from an employer-verified shift or manager action; employees do not self-declare work.
- A regular staff drink becomes available according to venue policy and expires that night. It is not banked.
- A Shiftie may represent a venue-defined drink, meal, or other one-time staff perk. The venue controls eligibility, accounting treatment, and redemption rules.
- A bonus Shiftie is issued by an authorized manager and does not expire by default.
- Redemption is completed by an authorized bartender, manager, or redeemer through a scan or controlled code flow.
- Organizations control locations, roles, eligibility, timing, drink rules, and administrative privileges.
- Alcohol-free choices are first-class options, not a disclaimer.
- Sponsorship never overrides venue policy, age rules, responsible service, or employee privacy.

## Audience order

1. **Venue owners and managers** need control, confidence, and a useful record.
2. **Hospitality employees** need immediacy, dignity, and a perk that feels fun rather than monitored.
3. **Bartenders and redeemers** need a one-handed flow that is faster than an explanation.
4. **Advertising partners** need a high-affinity hospitality audience and a tasteful, measurable placement.

When priorities conflict, protect the venue policy and employee experience first.

## Messaging architecture

### Core product line

**Staff perks, handled.**

Use for the website, product descriptions, sales materials, and operational explanations.

**Staff drinks, handled.** remains the preferred line for drink-specific House Pour Club materials.

### Employee-facing promise

**Free drink. Earned tonight.**

Use when a venue's policy supports the claim. If the benefit is not always free, replace "Free drink" with the venue's exact benefit.

### Brand signature

**You earn it. We pour it.**

Use as a footer, poster sign-off, sticker line, or campaign signature.

### Venue proof points

- Set the policy once.
- Verify the shift; release the perk.
- One scan creates a clean record.
- Regular Shifties expire tonight. Bonus Shifties wait for the right night.

### Partner proposition

**Earn the recommendation before it reaches the guest.**

Partner language should emphasize hospitality relevance, a useful employee benefit, product education, responsible service, zero-proof inclusion, and venue control. Avoid surveillance language and inflated reach claims until supported by live distribution data.

## Voice and tone

Shiftie sounds like a great bartender explaining a smart house rule: concise, warm, clear, and completely unruffled.

### Voice attributes

- **Industry-literate:** knows the shift, the checkout, the house pour, and the difference between a perk and a comp.
- **Direct:** short sentences, useful verbs, no SaaS fog.
- **Celebratory:** the reward feels earned, not rationed.
- **Respectful:** never infantilizes staff or frames every employee as a fraud risk.
- **Confident:** policy details are stated plainly.

### Preferred language

Use: `Shiftie`, `staff perk`, `staff drink`, `shift meal`, `house pour`, `ready after your shift`, `redeem`, `bonus Shiftie`, `venue policy`, `alcohol-free`, `redeemer`, `clean record`, `reconcile`.

Avoid: `surveillance`, `track your employees`, `police comps`, `free booze`, `users` when `employees` or `teams` is more human, and cutesy tiki dialect.

## Visual direction: Pacific Modern

The approved identity combines crisp mid-century hospitality signage with soft Pacific-modern shapes, tactile matchbook printing, and a restrained tropical vocabulary.

Reference qualities include substantial sculpted lettering, clean sign-painted edges, curved Haywood-Wakefield-era forms, and the transportive atmosphere of classic mid-century tropical venues. These are directional references only; never copy an existing logo, artifact, or trademark.

### The balance

- **More:** carved, optimistic, tactile, warm, substantial, coastal, night-shift.
- **Less:** cartoon tiki, novelty luau, corporate resort, editorial institution, faux-vintage clutter.

### Texture

Use warm paper grain, restrained ink distress, brass-foil accents, and simple screen-print registration character. Texture is a finish, not a legibility tax. Product UI remains cleaner than campaign art.

### Iconography

The core vocabulary is the coupe and lime, starburst, palms, waves, citrus, umbrella, and simple barware. Icons use few strokes, rounded joins, and clear silhouettes. Avoid cultural masks, sacred imagery, caricature, or pseudo-Polynesian glyphs.

## Logo system

The wordmark is custom outlined artwork derived from the approved visual direction. It has no font dependency and must not be retyped.

### Logo hierarchy

1. **Primary wordmark:** default brand identifier.
2. **Horizontal lockup:** headers, sponsor strips, venue collateral, and wide placements.
3. **Stacked House Pour Club lockup:** posters, landing-page moments, and narrative brand applications.
4. **Round badge:** stickers, avatars, stamps, coasters, and social uses.
5. **Coupe-and-lime mark:** app chrome, favicons, compact controls, and merchandise details.

### Clear space

Keep clear space equal to the cap-height of the wordmark's `I` on every side. For the standalone mark, use one-quarter of the coupe width.

### Minimum size

- Wordmark: 120 px wide on screen or 1.25 in in print.
- Horizontal lockup: 220 px wide on screen or 2.25 in in print.
- Standalone mark: 24 px on screen. Use the simplified app-icon export below 32 px.
- Round badge: 96 px on screen or 1 in in print.

### Logo color rules

- Use Midnight Navy on Warm Cream or Paper Stock.
- Use Warm Cream on Midnight Navy or Palm Green.
- Use the full-color lockups only on a quiet, light field.
- Coral is an accent wordmark, not the default identifier.
- Never add shadows, gradients, bevels, outlines, or unapproved colors to the wordmark.
- Never stretch, rotate, re-space, crop, or rearrange logo components.

## Color system

| Role | Name | Hex | Use |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Primary dark | Midnight Navy | `#102638` | Wordmark, text, scanner field, night-shift surfaces |
| Primary light | Warm Cream | `#F5EEDF` | Main background, paper, reversed marks |
| Action | Coral | `#D96B54` | Primary actions, redemption energy, starbursts |
| Support | Seafoam | `#A9C3B6` | Valid states, waves, calm secondary surfaces |
| Premium accent | Brass | `#B08A49` | Dividers, foil cues, partner moments, icon details |
| Deep support | Palm Green | `#173B31` | Venue/admin surfaces and tropical depth |
| Action dark | Oxblood | `#873D38` | Coral hover/pressed states and warnings |
| Clean field | Paper Stock | `#FFFAF0` | Cards, forms, and clean asset backgrounds |

Midnight on Cream and Cream on Midnight are the default accessible text pairings. Coral, Seafoam, and Brass are accents; do not use them for small body copy without a contrast check.

Machine-readable values are in `palette/shiftie-palette.css` and `palette/shiftie-palette.json`.

## Typography

### Brand wordmark

Use the supplied outlined artwork only. Do not approximate it with a retail typeface.

### Product and marketing type

- **Primary sans:** Geist Sans, 400–800. Use heavier weights for marketing headlines instead of a formal serif.
- **Operational labels:** Geist Mono, 600–700, uppercase with moderate tracking.
- **Display treatment:** short, heavy, tightly composed, and sentence-case unless the UI calls for a ticket-style label.

Avoid defaulting to Georgia, Times, high-contrast editorial serifs, or generic slab serif display faces. The custom wordmark supplies the vintage character; interface typography supplies clarity.

## Layout and motion

- Use ticket edges, thin brass rules, rounded cards, quiet circles, and generous cream negative space.
- Keep primary actions obvious and thumb-friendly.
- Let one tropical motif carry a screen; do not decorate every corner.
- Motion should feel like a stamp, slide, reveal, or scanner pass. Avoid casino-like sparkle loops.
- Sponsorship occupies clearly bounded inventory and never competes with the coupon, expiry, or redemption state.

## Photography and illustration

Favor real hospitality texture: closing light, stainless and tile, worn wood, glassware, hands at work, post-shift ease, and mixed front- and back-of-house teams. Keep people candid and adult. Do not romanticize intoxication or depict unsafe service.

Illustration stays flat, limited-palette, and screen-print friendly. Use Midnight, Coral, Seafoam, Brass, and Cream before introducing new colors.

## Alcohol and partner guardrails

- Never target or depict minors.
- Always leave venue policy and legal service decisions with the venue.
- Treat alcohol-free offers as equal creative territory.
- Do not imply that a shift drink is owed regardless of conduct, law, age, or responsible-service policy.
- Do not sell individual employee behavior or redemption history to advertisers.
- Label paid partner placements clearly and keep them outside the redemption decision itself.

## File map

- `logos/svg/`: production vector logos and lockups.
- `logos/png/`: transparent raster exports for common delivery.
- `icons/svg/`: scalable mark and app-icon masters.
- `icons/png/`: platform-ready icon exports.
- `palette/`: CSS, JSON, GIMP, SVG, and PNG palette references.
- `reference/`: approved visual board.
- `source/`: extraction masks and reproducible generation scripts.
- `../public/brand/`: web-delivery copies consumed by the Shiftie app.

When a future design conflicts with this brief, the approved reference board plus the primary outlined wordmark win until this document is intentionally revised.