CAFE LAube

The Brief

CAFE LAube roasts its own coffee and runs eight shops in Iwate Prefecture. In June 2025 it opened a counter in the Shinkansen waiting room at JR Morioka Station, and customers of a new kind began to arrive. The company wanted to show what it does in a form people could see, and it asked us to take on every part of a new website, by one person and all at once.

For more than ten years, since 2014, CAFE LAube has stayed close to the people of its region and shared the pleasure of coffee roasted in its own shops. Its story began around 2008, when Kazuma Akedo, now the CEO, was moved by a single cup. In Kitakami, a town where canned coffee was still the everyday drink, he built a roaster and a shop with his own hands, and the company’s history started there.

The Story Is Already There

The challenge was to give form to a feeling that runs through everything CAFE LAube does but had never been put into words. Conversation after conversation led us to a single idea, “the story is already there.” Our work was to take in that story faithfully and give it a shape.

One Person, One Whole

A project like this usually means coordinating several outside specialists, a photographer, a designer and a writer among them. Here one person brought all of it together, and the greatest advantage was consistency. We stayed with the client until we understood what they were truly trying to say, then shaped it with our own hands. The site speaks both to the history that has become part of daily life in Iwate and to what draws people from further away. Because the new shop sees many travellers from abroad, the brand story was written in Japanese and English.

Making It

The concept took shape over conversations beforehand. In the second week of June 2026 we visited all eight shops in a single day and took every photograph, and the website went live on 1 July. We will keep the conversation going as CAFE LAube moves into its next stage.