What mythical figure appears in the Starbucks logo?

The Starbucks logo features a two-tailed siren, a mythical sea figure adapted from European folklore and maritime imagery.

The design reflects Starbucks’ original nautical identity. The company’s name was inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, while its early Seattle setting connected naturally with seafaring themes. The first logo, introduced when Starbucks opened in 1971, showed a more explicit and detailed siren in brown.

Starbucks progressively simplified and recolored the emblem. The 1987 version used a green-and-black palette after Howard Schultz acquired the company, and later redesigns removed much of the surrounding text. In 2011, Starbucks introduced a version showing only the green siren, without the company name.

The figure is often casually called a mermaid, but Starbucks describes it as a siren. The two tails are an important identifying feature and distinguish the emblem from an ordinary single-tailed mermaid.