How Blank Street Coffee Became a Blank Canvas for Internet Girlies

Where there’s a flock of young women decked out in baggy pants and baggier jackets and little sunglasses, there’s a good chance Emma Chamberlain has something to do with it. Over three days this past September, a fair share of them made a pilgrimage to a rare in-person event anointed with the creative touch of their Gen Z matriarch. Their TikTok chronicles followed a common formula: a fit check, a pan down to their shoes (leather loafers, worn-in cowboy boots), and a final shot populated by other eager attendees with aligned aesthetic sensibilities. 

The destination in question? Blank Street Coffee, which was housing a pop-up collaboration with Chamberlain’s eponymous coffee. 

Blank Street, which has lodged itself with brute force into the urban zeitgeist by opening over 40 locations in New York City seemingly overnight (13 more in London and 2 in both Washington, DC and Boston) has drawn criticism for its venture-capital-backed proliferation-first business model. To the cynics, the chain represents a grab bag of late-stage capitalism issues: Silicon Valley taking over the world, the flattening of human taste, and the continued corporatization of neighborhoods like Williamsburg, where the shop got its start. 

But these skeptics fall outside of one of Blank Street’s more popular customer profiles: an influencer-obsessed audience that’s younger, hipper, and chicer than their Starbucks-toting counterparts. 

The proof is in the pop-ups. This year Blank Street has partnered with a number of brands helmed by—or otherwise approved of by—influencers, such as Chamberlain Coffee, Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila, and sunscreen brand Supergoop. In each instance, the partnering brand transposed its trademark patterns and color schemes directly onto Blank Street’s storefronts. Think: stores dressed head to toe in bright yellow for Supergoop; a massive 818 logo emblazoned on a hanging sign (with “by Blank Street” in smaller letters below), with totes and hats for grabs inside; Chamberlain Coffee’s cutesy and colorful animal mascots plastered across a window display.

Because the chain’s baseline aesthetic is remarkably, well, blank, the storefronts act as ideal neutral backdrops for buzzy partnerships with It-girl influencers. Its storefronts are outfitted with pale wood, white tiling, and a logo styled in an oppressively inoffensive Helvetica-esque sans serif font. So Blank Street has outsourced a big chunk of its identity to its partners; like a chameleon, it seamlessly assumes the vibe of the influencer of the day and gets points for having partnered with them. 

Even if a pop-up on its own doesn’t immediately convert Kendall Jenner die-hards into Blank Street loyalists, the visibility and name recognition of a partnership cements the coffee brand as something relevant to their niche, says Amanda Mull, a staff writer for The Atlantic who often reports on consumerism.

“You don’t necessarily have to think Blank Street is super cool,” Mull argues. “You just have to recognize that it is something that people your age, demographic, and aesthetic sometimes go to.”

These three brands don’t alone represent the gamut of Blank Street’s partnerships. With “great coffee, for everyone” as its slogan, it’s also collaborated with hot sauce brand Mike’s Hot Honey, streetwear brand Only NY, clothes recycling company SuperCircle, and a handful of local organizations and nonprofits like D.C. Central Kitchen and BK for Black Lives. 

“As a young brand, we’re always looking to innovate on the customer experience,” says Issam Freiha, Blank Street’s cofounder. “Partnerships are one way to do that.”

According to the brand, the average age of a customer is 37, and the gender doesn’t lean towards men or women. While the coffee chain isn’t exclusively drawing influencer-obsessed Gen Z customers, Blank Street is becoming associated with a large share of them. Perhaps no other coffee company, however trendy, has become so closely linked with this niche fan base.  

In these pop ups, customers seem to relegate Blank Street’s core product (coffee, lest you forget) to the back seat. Sure, the coffee is fine—good, even—but that’s not the point. And it’s not necessarily why fans keep coming back for a second cup. 

At least, that appears to be the case from the social media uptake.

Blank Street’s February collaboration with Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila drew buzz akin to its Chamberlain Coffee partnership, with crowds lining up in the dead of winter, hoping to snag a free 818-branded hat or tote, and maybe even a free “Reposado Americano” spiked coffee while they were at it.

The TikTok “vibe checks” of the pop-up centered more upon the 818 merchandise—anything that had to do with Blank Street focused on its atmosphere, not necessarily its coffee. 

One attendee captioned their TikTok: “review: i love coffee. i love tequila. but maybe not together? I love you tho kenny.”

She finished: “DONT REGRET SO FUN AND CUTE GO!!” 

Another wrote, “waits on line for 2 hours for free tequila and hopes to get free 818 merch.” 

Blank Street is an ideal space to hold these influencer pop-ups in part because of its look: nondescript and virtually colorless. Its style takes cues from a broad movement toward a sterile aesthetic in public spaces, one that author Kyle Chayka coined as “AirSpace” in The Verge: “The realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go.” That’s reclaimed wood, exposed lighting fixtures, and highly minimalist furniture, to name a few. And the homogeneity of AirSpace, he argues, lends itself to “frictionless” travel between its occupants, blurring the line marking the end of one locale and the beginning of another. 

“Blank Street is the ultimate end point of that aesthetic,” Chayka tells me. 

The café can metamorphosize into a vehicle for any branded pop-up. The relationship is symbiotic: With influencers’ brands residing primarily online, Blank Street’s numerous locales across New York, London, Boston, and Washington, DC, provide them with brick-and-mortar outposts in urban centers. In turn, influencers bring high-profile visibility to Blank Street.

According to Blank Street, its partnership with 818 was the first opportunity for many New Yorkers to try 818 firsthand. The two-day pop-up attracted over 2,000 visitors, most of them first-time Blank Street customers.  

As sterile as the coffee chain looks, its “aesthetic vernacular,” Mull says, is recognizable to a large swath of coffee consumers, many of whom view Starbucks as an outdated totem of suburbia (although many young people remain Starbucks fans too). “People who are younger and slightly more fashionable, and interested in the Emma Chamberlains of the world and interested in the Kendall Jenners of the world, are sort of a fertile market for their own Starbucks,” Mull says. The chain’s minimal, pastel-hued decor and influencer partnerships make it “recognizable and familiar and reliable for younger women who live in cities and work in office jobs,” she says. 

Notably missing from that formula is the quality of the coffee itself. But consumers, including harried city commuters, don’t seem to go to Blank Street for the best cup of coffee; they’re just looking for a relatively inexpensive ($4.25 for a 16-ounce iced latte) and decent one, in the least amount of time possible. Blank Street represents a “turn-away from millennial artisanal culture, where everyone cares where everything comes from,” Chayka says. 

Blank Street’s marketing, pegged to both coolness and convenience, belies a fundamental argument: “Coffee isn’t that cool,” Chayka says. “Specialty coffee is not cool.”

Take the example of the chain’s recent collaboration with Overheard, an Instagram brand that posts user-submitted sound bites heard in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In the partnership, Blank Street emblazoned coffee sleeves and A-Frame signs outside its New York shops with Overheard NY quotes, such as “I’m bi-coastal in the sense that I sometimes go to the West Village,” and “Having a coffee habit in NY is the same as having a car payment in the Midwest.” Overheard’s head of marketing, Bridget Berman, says that Overheard is “snarky” and “urban,” and, in the same vein, Blank Street is “young” and “Instagrammable.” It’s also everywhere in New York.

In conceptualizing the partnership and its driving themes, “it was New York first,” says Berman. “Then coffee second.” According to Blank Street, the chain pursues partnerships based on product quality and accessibility, and it aims to highlight both brand personalities. 

The It-girl personalities end up embodying a well-established aesthetic reference: the aspirational, effortlessly cool (and often white) girl who never seems to fade from generation to generation, only taking on new forms. Blank Street’s green-hued Instagram account is full of vaguely generic, cool-toned snapshots (many of them sourced from Pinterest). This feed may read more like a relic of 2015 Tumblr than an accurate visual diary of today’s aesthetic markers, but it’s nonetheless clawing at a modern definition of cool by way of its influencer spokespeople. 

With the hand-holding of a Chamberlain Coffee pop-up, Blank Street is taking one step closer to near-ubiquitous brand recognition among a coveted coffee-drinking niche—even if it didn’t come for the coffee to begin with.