How Starbucks designed its new iconic cup and big comfy chair

The coffee chain wants to revive hospitality with premium mugs and a plush chair that hearkens back to its ’90s heyday.

[Photo: Courtesy of Starbucks]

Since taking over the coffee chain in 2024, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol has been on a mission to go “back to Starbucks” and rekindle the feeling of warmth inside the coffee giant.

That’s led to new store designs, new employee training, new uniforms, new menu items, and new staffing—which have helped the company break out of a two-year sales rut. 

But as part of this deep strategic exploration, Niccol made two specific asks for Starbucks’s cross-discipline design team that are being revealed today: an iconic new cup and a new plush chair.

As the literal touchpoints between the consumer and the company, “they are the biggest signals we have of warmth, comfort, and generosity,” says Dawn Clark, SVP of global concepts and design at Starbucks. 

The new Starbucks cup (ceramic in every size)

The new Starbucks cup is not just one cup, but five different glazed ceramic options—each offered to customers who stay to enjoy their coffee. Built to accommodate drinks ranging from a single shot of espresso to a venti latte, the cups come in white (inspired by their takeaway cup, with a hand-painted green siren and rim), and green (where the siren is embossed). Notably, the cups all share the same tapered silhouette. 

Clark says the cup design took inspiration from a blend of Italy’s espresso culture and Starbucks’s own mercantile and coffee trading history. The result lands somewhere between European sensibility and American utility. After concepting different designs, they came up with four frontrunners which they 3D printed and shared with various stakeholders across the company—ranging from corporate executives to on-the-ground baristas. They refined the designs and rendered them in ceramic before making the final choice.

The company knew it wanted a single, strongly branded silhouette across every size, which limited what could work. “It’s a really big design challenge because not all those forms that looked good in a short or tall looked great in a mini or large size,” Clark says. The other, perhaps bigger problem was drinkability. Different geometries affect how the coffee flows into your mouth, and those geometries don’t always scale well. They also needed to survive countless rounds of dishwashers.

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