Sugar Hill Creamery

The Brief

Sugar Hill Creamery opened its doors on Lenox Avenue in 2017, the first family-owned ice cream shop Harlem had seen in decades. Eight years, three storefronts, and a mobile truck later, Sugar Hill Creamery has grown into Harlem’s scoop of choice, and the brand had outgrown the identity it started with. The store told a rich story: hand-painted murals of local legends, flavors rooted in the African diaspora, a genuine third space for the neighborhood. But the printed materials weren’t telling that same story. SHC needed an identity system built to hold everything the brand had become, timeless and trustworthy enough to anchor a Harlem institution, bold enough to travel to catering tables in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard.

The Work

We built Sugar Hill Creamery a complete identity system, not just a single mark. That meant six-plus logo lockups engineered for every use case the brand actually needs, from packaging and signage to social and merch, so the same identity that feels at home on 116th Street holds up anywhere in New York City. A custom pattern system draws from the West African textiles of Little Senegal, the neighborhood corridor blocks from the brand’s original store, carried through packaging and brand graphics as a signature visual language rather than decoration. The color palette kept Sugar Hill Creamery’s trusted blue at its core while expanding the range to give the brand more room to move. Every piece was built to feel like an institution and a neighbor at the same time.

A new Squarespace website is bringing that same identity online. The site gives Sugar Hill Creamery’s collaborations a real home, from Harlem Flavor of the Week to the Harlemites series, and introduces a three-tier loyalty program, Neighbor, Friend, Family, that mirrors the brand’s own mission in practice, not just in name. An expanded Community page brings the events calendar in-house instead of relying on a sparse external link, and the catering page is being rebuilt to qualify leads with real visual assets before an inquiry ever hits the inbox. The build is fully ADA compliant from the ground up.

A Brand Partner

Right now, we’re working alongside Sugar Hill Creamery as their embedded brand partner, carrying the new identity into everyday use across all stores. That means production-ready packaging, updated menu boards, storefront decals, and merch rollouts, alongside marketing templates and seasonal brand collateral that keep the identity consistent as flavors change throughout the year.