A return to the spirit of store one.
I’ve worked in the Seattle coffee brewing experience for several decades. And all the while, I’ve been a lover of coffee — and the coffee sensate experience.
There are two favorites for me. One, coffee made, “cowboy style”, in Java. There’s a density and cinnamon edge to that which is truly remarkable. Another, in Firenze, a quadro-macchiato, is another savored experience, while listening to the bells tolling in the great square, in the heart of that city. There are surely others. But those two come to mind.
Learning from working with roasters and café savants, while spinning the stories and visualizations of their brands, I’ve learned how to inhale the scent and taste of coffee. And finally, as a lover of fragranced wafts of pro fuma, the dark coffee scent note in the vocabulary of perfume, a deeper, woodier hint, like that of tobacco, oud wood, tonka bean, vetiver is another collection of sensuality that I find titillating.
Coffee love and lore runs deep in my veins.
And during that selfsame time, it’s taken me from working on creating Jimmy Stewart’s Stewart Brothers Coffee collaborating on the first store — and story, in Post Alley, in the memorable Pike Place Market along with then budding designer, (and childhood connection for me in Spokane)
Tom Kundig – a new entry in the architecural firm that I’d been creating retail design with — Olson Walker. That firm went on to blazing national, and international design prominence, as Olson Sundberg Kundig and Allen. I created the design package for them, as well. We’d designed a monogram treatment for the opening brand positioning — for everything from Jimmy’s brilliantly red (their corporate palette that we’d created) Mercedes antique coupe, to the coffee cups and interiors.
Stewart Brothers — due to an infringement settlement (another company called Stewart Brothers that was offering product that “related” to coffee, and eliciting possible consumer confusion) became, with our supporting recommendation, Seattle’s Best Coffee.
We took that look and feel, as well as the pervasive sense of storytelling that Jimmy so cherished in the legacy of his brand, to multiple locations.
There are others:
We also worked with Paul Odom, on creating the Café Fonté brand — building out the character of that brand under his roasting expertise and aesthetic leadership — and creating retail concepts in his first real store — and storied — presence in Chicago.
Sorry that the pictures aren’t better — they are what they are…
Each of these retailers was searching for a way to tell a story, and even back in the 80s and 90s, we were working on building brand storytelling into virtually everything that we’d created for our clients around the country, and for that matter, the world. And, from heart, and strategy, and storytelling — we built imagery to support that connection — and embracement — in community. Brands grew; and our stories continued to evolve with them.
Sometime back, a couple of years ago, I’d commented about Starbuck’s need to return to their heart, Store one, Pike Place Market. And I can recall that day, with Howard Schultz, speaking outside the store, to a group of investors. And it was his launch story — and the beginning to the concretion of his dream, after other, manifold developments, explorations and transitions.
Working with another brand partner, an international food group, I’d partnered on the creation of a concept that would be potentially integrated into an emerging store conception — and working in tandem with Starbucks — we needed to know more about what that concept was. Linking up with Arthur Rubinfeld, we explored, along with his design team, and Liz Mueller, a series of examinations of archetypes. I’d call them archetypes, not prototypes, since Arthur’s strategy was to reach into the psyche of various consumers, as well as the heart of the brand, to evince a new Starbucks community and spirituality; it was surely about design language, but more so to newly explore relationships, and what might be defined as the most desirable character of presence, in place-making, for re-stitching guest connectedness.
Here are the outcomes for one grouping of conceptual expressions. That is — this is the first concept prototype of what might be, potentially down the line, a series of new retail dimensions.
A draped entry
A darker, cozier interior presence, with a view to Pike Street
The wood, laid bare — sand blasted columns and concrete base
Wabi sabi
The entry sales procession — beginning in the aft of the store
Concrete floors and remade café furniture
Wooden venetian blinds, with a view to the south, Pike Place Market signing
The rear, art coffee story installations
Construction details, shown
The sequence, shown (and, tuning the installations)
Layered panel expressions
The flow of the wood, naturally expressed
Broken edged marble installations
A proud badge of commitment
Merchandising, cold rolled steel modular planning
Long tables, a la Pain Quotidien
Marked, messaged surfaces (the long table)
Rear wall merchandising calligraphy
A design vocabulary
Concrete tinting
Art, merchandised
Steel, detailed
Exterior vocabulary, darkened
What I’d offer is the idea of returning to the brand heart, as I’d referenced in earlier blog notes, that it’s always getting back to the center of impression — where the founder’s found foundation, the original visioning of the dream, and what telling will resonate in a new manner, to the wandering audience. If there’s a story to be told, how do you tell it — hold to the heart, the truth, the true story, and the viewer will be newly drawn to the captivation of the telling. My tale-spin, to reference, from a couple of years back — “Starbucks, go home, get back to store, to story, one.”
They did.
What’s your take on this?
tsg
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Exploring coffee + community | from NYC
A view to the world, the heritage of store one, recounted in place, made.
Hello, Tim, I’ve enjoyed a tasty cup of coffee this morning, while perusing the brand storytelling section of your blog. Your story of trying to help Starbucks’ retail experience return to its roots sparked my long simmering frustration with their fall from grace.
There’s a gap between where your story starts (your luscious description of the coffee aromas and taste sensations) and the brand artifacts you describe and visualize in this sequence of images. Where’s the smell of the freshly roasted coffee in either today’s or your re-imagined Starbucks venue?
I have fond memories of the funky old Starbucks store in the center of town (on Mercer Island), a place now long gone. The drawers were full of (relatively) freshly roasted coffee, and the baristas would haul out big bags from which to parcel out your order (which could be in larger or smaller lots than what’s possible today with their manufactured coffee-bean-bag approach). It smelled so good in that old store. I enjoyed every visit there, including the wait for a table to free up.
The new stores have much more convenient seating, and yes, they’ve achieved a community-fostering presence. (I see swim team planning sessions, prayer meetings, kids relaxing after school, realtor-buyer interactions, lovers and friends.) But coffee enjoyment is now such a small part of the experience. Almost an afterthought. The coffee no longer tastes as good, and if you go into the store on off hours, as I do, you might not even smell the coffee.
And the fact that the bags no longer proudly display the roasting date reinforces my suspicion that they’re going thru a long distribution chain, so the company can no longer deliver on their original authentic, coffee-grounded experience. Somehow the core product just feels like it’s “processed.”
Yes, I enjoy their one-time boutique brands, but I now have a transactional relationship with the brand: I go into the store (note I didn’t say coffee shop), buy a bag of beans, and leave. Maybe I’ll stay for a while if I’m away from home and killing time before the next meeting (or flight to catch), but they no longer offer a destination that I make time to go to.
I don’t know how Starbucks is going to balance their enormous retail model, which depends on a “factory like automation” process of consistency in order to support rapid expansion — against their loss of that original brand promise: a sensuous coffee-animated experience. For me, the joy is gone, long gone.
I’d tell you a story of the quintessential coffee enjoyment experience, in Libourne (east of Bordeaux), but I’ve already rambled on too long.
Good luck — I hope you can help bring them back to their original brand promise.
Comment by Christine Thompson — April 1, 2009 @ 7:55 am
Very nice, indeed. The concepts, intention, ideas are great.
My only reservation, is a fear of “manufactured realness”. That’s something that strikes a sort of metaphysical horror in my heart.
When “realness” . . . grit, grunge, patina, traces of past people’s presence . . . is manufactured, what does that do to “real realness”?
Real realness becomes devalued by becoming indistinguishable from manufactured realness. That is very scary for me.
Analogies, real and theoretical:
Pre-distressed jeans with rips and threadbare knees manufactured and laboriously distressed by hand in sweatshops in developing countries like Indonesia, where the laborers themselves can only dream of owning a pair of new, durable, pristine trousers in perfect condition. Meanwhile the people who wear the expensive, distressed jeans have never done anything rugged in their life, nor worn clothes long enough to wear anything out.
What if Citigroup’s marketing advisors discovered that people view the corporation as too big, and slick and impersonal . . . too “professional,” so they created a cozy and worn and loved image to respond to those findings. Logo, corporate HQ interiors, banch branch interiors that looked worn and cozy and distressed by time and use. It’s not that the strategy is irrelevant to the product here . . . it’s the inauthenticity of the attempt to be “authentic”.
That really scares me.
Maybe we’re all getting too good at communicating and less good at being.
Comment by Susi Johnston — May 30, 2009 @ 8:23 pm
I like the look of real wood countertops, real hand-lettered chalk board menus and stained concrete, but this design language would be too expensive to roll out on a large scale. I also agree completely with Susi Johnston’s comment above about the manufactured “rustic-ness”. This is not wabi sabi, this is much more like the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland… you can tell many craftspeople labored long hours to create the patina. It may become more authentic as time passes, since this is a high traffic location, but when I visited this store it seemed kinda contrived. Even those little circular placards seemed to have been ‘pre-distressed”. I thought the Starbucks-branded light fixtures were a little bit over the top, too.
But, my biggest complaint is the design of the damn door pull handles at the entrance! The designer of these wins the award for the most counter-intuitive door pull design ever. A person naturally grasps the pull, only to find there is no cut-out to grab. So, the person’s natural reaction is to assume that it is not a door pull, but rather the door needs to be pushed. So s/he pushes…the door won’t budge. Hmm… the door must be pulled, then, but now the person has to figure out where s/he can grasp the pull to be able to open the door. Frustration, even before the customer gets into the store. This is not a good way to make a first impression. I thought perhaps I was the dummy, so I camped out and watched people as they entered the store. I observed many, many people confounded by the door pulls.
Maybe the frustration of the entry has colored my opinion of the interior… but you know what they say: You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Comment by Randy Willoughby — June 9, 2009 @ 7:22 am