Where does the Starbucks logo originate from? What does it symbolize?
When we were originally looking for a logo for Starbucks in 1971, we wanted to capture the seafaring tradition of early coffee traders. The name Starbucks itself comes from the first mate’s name in the classic novel, Moby Dick. We pored over old marine books until we came up with a logo based on an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid encircled by the store’s original name, Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice. The twin-tailed mermaid, or siren as she’s called in Greek mythology, and the rich, brown coffee color of the logo came to mean good coffee to thousands of coffee drinkers worldwide.
