Altry
Client:
Altry Coffee Roastery
Sector:
HoReCo, F&B
Year:
2025-Present
Brand Origin:
Gurugram, HR, India
Services:
Brand Evolution, Experience Design, Brand Direction and Visualisation
Awesome collaboration with:
Sahil Bhambri
for content and coffee
Ratya
for logo design
A coffee brand that refused to be commercial needed a design partner who refused to just deliver and move on. We came in as brand visualisers, showing up the way Altry asked everyone to. Slowly, with intention, and with genuine care for what was being built. Still going.
Altry
A coffee brand that refused to be commercial needed a design partner who refused to just deliver and move on. We came in as brand visualisers, showing up the way Altry asked everyone to. Slowly, with intention, and with genuine care for what was being built. Still going.
Client:
Altry Coffee Roastery
Sector:
HoReCo, F&B
Year:
2025-Present
Brand Origin:
Gurugram, HR, India
Services:
Brand Evolution, Experience Design, Brand Direction and Visualisation
Awesome collaboration with:
Sahil Bhambri
for content and coffee
Ratya
for logo design
Altry is a boutique coffee roastery, eatery, and experimental space tucked inside Crosspoint Mall in Gurgaon. Founded by Sahil Bhambri, a coffee roaster with ten plus years of practice and a background in literature, philosophy, psychology, and community building. The cafe was built as an alternative story to the noise, trends, and jargon that has overtaken the Indian coffee industry. The original logo and core characters, the Altry Man and Ophelia, were designed by the visual artist Ratya in collaboration with Sahil.
Altry is not commercial. It is not trend following. It is culture making. A place where rest is treated as resistance, and where every choice carries intent.
This one didn’t begin with a brief, a deck, or a kickoff call. It began with a friend setting up a roastery and a designer who needed somewhere to play. Sahil and I had been talking for a while before Altry took shape inside Crosspoint Mall, and when the cafe started coming together, the conversation turned into a collaboration without anyone really announcing it. I wanted a project that let me sketch by hand, taste coffee, and try things I couldn’t try elsewhere. Sahil wanted someone who would treat the brand the way he treated his beans. Slowly, with intention, and without rushing the answer. So we just kept going.
Altry didn’t need credibility. Sahil had built the philosophy, the roasting craft, and the cafe’s point of view long before the design conversation began.
The challenge was translation. How do you take an idea like “rest is resistance” and stretch it across an entire ecosystem of touchpoints, surfaces, and small everyday interactions, without diluting the weight that idea carries? How do you design inside a category where almost every cafe is leaning on the same minimal aesthetic, the same calm palette, and the same quiet typography, without falling into the same trap yourself? And how do you do all of it when the logo and the core characters already exist, drawn by another artist, carrying a voice that is not yours?
My job was not to start a brand. It was to extend one, carefully, slowly, without flattening the strange, quiet thing Altry was trying to be in a category that rarely allows strangeness.
The approach for Altry didn’t follow the usual rhythm of brand work. There was no kickoff deck, no formal design direction document, no carefully staged big reveal. The work moved the way the cafe moved. Slowly, in conversation, often over a cup that was still being roasted, tasted, and questioned.
My role was that of a brand visualiser, not a designer starting from scratch. The logo and core characters had already been drawn by another artist, so my job was to build the visual world that surrounded them. That meant spending time understanding how Sahil talked about the brand, how the existing characters carried their own weight, and where the visual language could be stretched without breaking the tone already in place. A lot of the decisions happened at the cafe itself, with a sketchbook open and a coffee being brewed nearby.
Every output, whether functional or experiential, was treated as an extension of the same thought. Nothing was meant to feel like marketing. Everything was meant to feel like Altry.
Before making anything new, the first job was to understand what already existed. The logo and characters Ratya had built for Sahil had a distinct hand to them. Loose, expressive, slightly raw, drawn with energy rather than precision. The Altry Man sat with his knees pulled in, radiating quiet intensity. Ophelia the dog held a cup with an almost comic calm. These were not corporate brand mascots. They were characters with interiority, and any extension of the visual language had to respect that.
The world being built around them needed to feel consistent without being rigid. Expressive without being chaotic. Rooted in the same hand drawn quality but scaled to work across print, fabric, packaging, and in cafe surfaces. The color world leaning into the existing Altry green, cream, and dark charcoal, felt like the natural anchor. Everything else would be built outward from there.
The application philosophy across all outputs was the same. Every piece needed to feel like it belonged to the same world without looking like it came off a template. That meant sketching more and polishing less. It meant letting things feel slightly imperfect where imperfection was honest. It meant writing copy that sounded like the cafe talked, short, dry, a little philosophical, occasionally funny in the way that catches you off guard.
The characters moved across surfaces in ways that extended their existing personalities rather than flattening them into decoration. The Altry Man appeared in different states of stillness. Ophelia showed up where a dog holding a coffee cup made the most sense. The typography and lettering choices leaned toward handmade over engineered, carrying the same quality as the illustration work rather than pulling against it.
The goal was never consistency for its own sake. It was coherence. There is a difference.
Altry’s verbal identity was not something that needed to be built from scratch. Sahil already had a voice, quiet, dry, philosophical, and occasionally funny in the way that catches you sideways rather than head on. The writing across the brand had been shaped by his background in literature and community building, and it showed. The job was to understand that voice well enough to write inside it without mimicking it.
Copy across the brand’s touchpoints didn’t describe products or services. It described states. A payment surface didn’t ask you to scan. It told you the rush was optional. A menu didn’t list ingredients in the usual way. It named dishes like they were moods. The verbal and visual identity were always treated as one system, two languages saying the same thing. Stillness. Intentionality. The quiet resistance of choosing to slow down.
Most projects have a clear shape. A client brings a problem, a designer solves it, work is delivered and signed off. Altry never worked like that. The relationship with Sahil was a creative partnership from the start, and the design process reflected that. Decisions didn’t come from presentations or approval rounds.
They came from conversations, sometimes long ones, sometimes happening over a cup that was still being dialled in. Sahil would share something about how the brand felt or what it was refusing to be, and that would shift the direction of whatever was being worked on. The process was more iterative and more instinctive than most formal engagements allow.
That kind of working relationship produces something that neither person could have arrived at alone. It shows up in the work as a quality that is difficult to name but easy to feel. Something that reads as genuinely made rather than professionally delivered.
Every project teaches you something. Most of that learning is about the client’s world, their industry, their constraints, their goals. Altry taught me something different. It taught me about my own working method.
Having a project with no formal contract pressure meant I could approach design decisions the way Sahil approached his roasts. Slowly, with genuine curiosity, without rushing to the answer that looked most professional. I sketched more, polished less. I wrote copy I would not have been bold enough to write for a paying client I barely knew. I spent real time at the cafe, tasting coffee, understanding what made one bean different from another, and that understanding quietly changed how I thought about the visual work.
When you genuinely understand what a brand is trying to feel like, not just look like, the design decisions become easier and more honest. Altry gave me that. A place to slow down and actually think.
Altry is not a finished project. It was never meant to be. The brand keeps growing the way the cafe keeps growing, slowly, with new ideas coming in through conversation rather than strategy decks.
There are designs still being explored, surfaces still being considered, and collaborations still being worked out. Some of it will make it into the world. Some of it will stay in the sketchbook. Both outcomes feel right for a brand that has never been in a rush.
Working on Altry has meant learning to hold a project loosely, to be comfortable with things being in progress, to trust that the right answer will arrive when the conversation is ready for it. That is not how most design work operates. It is how this one does.
What is certain is that the work continues. And that is the part of this collaboration that feels most true to what Altry actually is. A place that is always becoming, never quite done.
Some projects teach you about a category. Some teach you about a client. Altry taught me about what design can be when the conditions are right.
No formal brief. No approval stages. No rush to deliver and move on. Just two people building something they both believed in, slowly, over a lot of very good coffee.
The work that came out of it is honest in a way that is hard to manufacture under normal project conditions. It carries the texture of real collaboration, real time spent in the space, real understanding of what the brand was trying to be and what it refused to become.
That is what Altry is as a project. And that is the kind of work Sidharth.Design wants to keep doing more of.