When Toms was in search of a location to promote its Moments of Joy campaign, the footwear brand had a clear place in mind: La La Land Kind Cafe, the coffee chain whose sunny yellow interior has proved attractive to both consumers and brand partners.
The May activation spanned two weeks and two of La La Land’s Los Angeles locations, The Grove and Santa Monica’s Montana Avenue, where customers could browse the Toms Spring 2025 collection and enter its family casting call. According to Toms, the activation brought in more than 50,000 visitors and sold nearly 7,500 spirulina-topped “Toms Cup of Joy” lattes, designed exclusively for the event. While Toms did not earn any sales from those blue-foam lattes, the exposure is equally, if not more, valuable. The brand said it registered a 13% increase in awareness in Los Angeles following the partnership.
“Working with a coffee shop was an opportunity for us to tap into that inherent identity and affinity that the community has with their local coffee shop,” said Amber Tarshis, chief brand and impact officer at Toms. “It was about endearing us to the community and tapping into that positive halo that the local coffee shop already enjoys.”
For fashion and beauty brands looking for a way to resonate with consumers through one of their most reliable daily habits, coffee shops have emerged as a popular collaborative partner in 2025.
Los Angeles’s Alfred Coffee used its coffee sleeves to promote K-beauty brand Cosrx’s signature snail mucin products in July. In April, Dove and Emma Chamberlain’s Chamberlain Coffee launched a plant milk-inspired trio of body washes and offered a Dove Oat Milk & Berry Brulee Latte at coffee trucks throughout Los Angeles. In June, nail-care brand Chillhouse teamed up with coffee maker brand Keurig to offer a limited-edition manicure set and iced coffee drinks at its Soho salon.
“You are in the market for shoes a couple of times a year. You are in the market for coffee, if you’re a caffeine addict like myself, every single day of the year — possibly more than once a day,” said Tarshis. “And I think the same holds true in other categories.”
Coffee is just one genre in a growing stream of food and beverage collaborations. Those range from the expected, like U.K. ready-to-wear label Allsaints’s June partnership with London fish and chip chain Poppies, to the offbeat, like Revlon’s collaboration with Guy Fieri, slated for release in July. And that’s to say nothing of Erewhon, which has made itself the leader of consumable collabs with its smoothie partnerships with the likes of Dedcool and Vacation, Inc.
Those speak both to brands’ need to break through in a sea of competitors, but also to foodie culture’s evolution from niche interest to mainstream sport.
“In the past 20 years, you’ve had the combination of both food television and the social internet making people a lot more knowledgeable about food and cooking and various cuisines, and giving people the tools to share that across a wider audience than they previously would have been able to,” said Eater correspondent Jaya Saxena.
But coffee, with its reliable stream of devoted consumers, makes for an especially potent billboard.
“Caffeine is the last sort of acceptable addiction. I say this as someone who drinks coffee every morning,” said Saxena. “There’s still something a little utilitarian about coffee that a lot of people are like, ‘I can skip other indulgences, but I’m not skipping this.’”
Americans’ daily coffee habits may be under threat, however. In July, President Trump threatened a 50% tariff on goods imported from Brazil. The South American country is the world’s largest coffee producer and responsible for 30% of all coffee imported to the U.S. Matcha, a standard menu item at contemporary coffee shops, has also been subject to global shortages as devotees up their consumption.
When done well, today’s coffee shops offer not just an indulgence, but also a reflection of the local aesthetic, like the Korean-inspired Maru Coffee in Los Feliz or the Instagrammable pistachio-hued walls of Blank Street’s The Green Room location in Soho. The latter served as the exclusive launchpad for a limited-edition beverage in collaboration with celebrity fashion stylist Melissa Holdbrook-Akposoe in September.
“Coffee shops are really like communities within communities, and they each have their own identity that they’re building in their own culture,” said Tarshis. “I think many of us who stop and get a coffee in the morning really identify with the coffee shop that we frequent.”
But few coffee shops have made themselves into a canvas for co-branded collaborations quite like La La Land Kind Cafe. Since its first partnership with jewelry brand Kendra Scott in 2019, the coffee chain has worked with the likes of Nike, Rare Beauty and Lululemon.
“Our main objective always is, ‘Are we providing a cool experience for the customers, where it makes them happier?’” said La La Land Kind Cafe founder Francois Reihani. “When we do pop-ups or giveaways or collaborations with their favorite brands, if it brings excitement and it brings any value to our customers, then that’s when it’s a win for us.”
Reihani believes the chain, which has locations throughout California, Texas and, as of July, Tennessee, has earned its popularity as a collaborative brand partner by offering more than just a logo slap.
“With Rare Beauty and Selena [Gomez], she wanted our customers and her customers to feel valued, and that’s probably what’s most important to us. So when we did that collaboration, it was about giving back to all of our guests,” said Reihani of the December Rare Beauty collaboration, which offered 200 consumers a full-sized Rare Beauty product with their purchase. “If you look at what we’ve done, we’ve never taken the sleeve and just put an ad on it.”
It helps that La La Land offers its own devoted audience: According to Reihani, customers waited in line for up to six hours at the openings of its Nashville and Austin locations in July. That’s a lot of potential eyeballs for La La Land, and anyone looking to sell lip gloss or shoes to those on their daily coffee run.
