What’s up with the Mermaid on my Coffee Cup?

By Maria Micchelli

After satisfying your latest coffee fix, you settle into one of the comfortable chairs at your local Starbucks. As you sip your iced latté, your mind begins to wander, at least until you look down at your disposable plastic caffeine vessel. Hey, who’s this girl on my cup, and what’s with the fish tails? With Starbucks’ 35th anniversary this month and old logos making an appearance, this seems like an appropriate question.

Starbucks barista, Erica Vathis, finds herself confused by the mermaid logo.

“Honestly, I have no idea what that has to do with coffee,” Vathis says. “I think she is supposed to be some kind of siren.”

Senior Jenna Rathe, a frequent Starbucks patron, says she learned about the logo in an international relations class.

“I know it’s a mermaid,” Rathe says. “The name Starbucks comes from something about a ship, I think. It has something to do with Moby Dick.”

Mermaids, Moby Dick, specialty espresso drinks and two-dollar marshmallow squares? How does this all tie together?

While the Starbucks logo’s origin may seem confusing to some patrons, it is clear to Starbucks Chairman and CEO, Howard Schultz. In his book, Pour Your Heart Into It; How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, Schultz explains the birth of both the Starbucks name and logo.

According to Schultz’s book, Starbucks started out as a coffee, tea and spice shop where coffee was sold by the bag, not the cup. Schultz says one of the founders, Gordon Bowker, wanted to name his coffee shop Pequod, after the ship in Melville’s Moby Dick. After receiving some negative feedback from his creative partner, Terry Heckler, Bowker let Pequod go. The founders agreed they wanted to stay specific to the Northwest, and the name Starbo, a mining camp on Mt. Rainier, was considered. However, with Bowker’s persistence, Starbuck, the name of Pequod’s first mate, was chosen as a compromise.

With the name settled, Starbucks took on a nautical theme and Heckler came up with a logo designed after a Norse woodcut from the sixteenth century.

According to Schultz’s book, the emblem was “a two-tailed mermaid, or siren, encircled by the store’s original name, Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice. That early siren, bare-breasted and Rubenesque, was supposed to be as seductive as coffee itself.”

The siren was seductive, perhaps a little too much so, since the logo was changed from its original form to a tamer, covered up and cropped version. According to an online essay by Heinz Insu Fenkl, the original logo featured a bare-chested, heavyset woman with two fish tails and was simplified to a version more familiar today in 1987 when Schultz bought out the company. This mermaid was given a modern look and had wavy hair concealing her chest. In the final logo, created in 1992, the siren was cropped from the waist down, removing any sexual innuendo, and creating the illusion that she lost 30 pounds.

The original mermaid was given a second chance this month, in Washington and Oregon, for the franchise’s 35th birthday, where she caused some commotion. According to Seattlepi.com and The Associated Press, a Kent elementary school principal warned teachers to cover up the topless mermaid on their coffee cups. She felt the scantily clad siren would be distracting to her students.