All About Coffee: January 2014

BY LIZ STINSON
01.08.14
6:30 AM

Last November, Starbucks opened a new store, just like they’d already done more than 1,700 times in 2013. Like the Starbucks you pass on your way to work, this new coffee shop has everything you need for your caffeine consumption ritual: a coffee bar, cozy lounge and enough coffee choices to make you wired for days on end.

Only there’s a minor difference: This new Starbucks is on a moving train.

The coffee behemoth partnered up with Swiss train company SBB to convert a double-decker train car into a store that people could visit during their workday commute. Logistically speaking, it’s a smart move; instead of making busy customers come to them, they figured, why not just go to the customers? “It’s all about us meeting our customers where they are in their day,” says Bill Sleeth, Starbuck’s vice president of design for the Americas.

You could read the sentiment as just another one of the company’s plays for worldwide caffeine domination, but the intense customization of stores is actually an ongoing effort to make the Starbucks brand a little less brand-y. “What you don’t want is a customer walking into a store in downtown Seattle, walking into a store in the suburbs of Seattle and then going into a store in San Jose, and seeing the same store,” Sleeth explains. So how do you make the world’s largest coffee house feel like a neighborhood haunt? The answer: good design.

There was a time when Starbucks really was the coffee shop next door, but that was a long time ago. The company opened its first shop in Seattle in spring of 1971 and stayed relatively small (under 100 stores) for the next 20 years. Of course, since then Starbucks has boomed to be the largest chain of coffee shops in the world. Today, there are more than 18,000 shops worldwide.

But let’s go back in time a bit. In the mid 2000s, the chain was doing great, opening a store a day, branching into new territories like Asia and South America. The design team had opening new shops down to a science—or at least a kit of parts that made it easy to launch a cafe with as little risk and time as possible. Come 2007, the economy went south, and so did some of Starbuck’s business. In 2008, the company closed around 600 shops, prompting a change in senior leadership, and ultimately a change in design thinking.

The company polled customers to find out what they thought of their not-so-little local coffee shop. It turned out that for a lot of people Starbucks was becoming synonymous with fast food. “The customers were saying, ‘Everywhere I go, there you are,’ and not in a good way,” Sleeth says. “We were pretty ubiquitous.” Ubiquity isn’t a bad thing; it meant people wanted what they were selling.

But what’s good for the bottom line (mass production makes things cheaper) isn’t necessarily good for the brand. Starbucks execs wanted to transition from the singular brand they’d been working to establish worldwide, to focusing on more locally relevant design for each store. “There are lot of reasons people come to us; we know people come to us because of consistency quality, speed,” says Sleeth. “But we need to do something that felt authentic.” But how?

To Design Local, You Have to Be Local

They began by getting people out of Seattle. In 2008, nearly all of the company’s designers were stationed at the company’s headquarters in the Pacific Northwest. This meant someone who was designing a new store for a neighborhood in Houston or Chicago or New York had maybe never even been to the city they were creating a store for.

“We couldn’t design locally relevant stores, stores that would resonate with our customers from Seattle,” Sleeth explains. So they began relocating their design team, pushing them out from the headquarters into the actual communities where they would be designing stores. Today, Starbucks’ more than 200 designers are working out of 18 design studios around the world, with 14 of them stationed in the Americas.

As the designers became more familiar with their surroundings, they began to incorporate the communities’ stories into the designs. There are thoughtful touches like furniture made from reclaimed basketball court wood at the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn. And a brass-instrument chandelier hanging from the ceiling in the new Canal Street location in New Orleans. But even more interesting than that was the cultural observations the designers were able to make.

With more people on the ground, they began noticing things that might make a difference in not just the aesthetics, but how a particular customer might want to experience the shop. In metropolitan U.S. cities, for example, people tend to come in pairs or alone. They’ll saddle up to a long community table next to a stranger without giving it a second thought. In more urban settings, people will just sit right next to each other, alone but collectively together,” he explains.

While in places like China or Mexico City, the Starbucks experience is much more group-oriented. “People are in bigger groups, so you have think differently about the seating there.” he says. “They won’t crowd together in a banquet like they would in New York City.” This drove the designers to place more individual stools in the shops, so people could drag them around, creating impromptu group seating areas. The design in the Kerry Center location in Beijing, feels like a lounge, with a “coffee workshop” on the second level meant to teach a predominantly tea-focused culture about coffee.

Design Is a Business

Creating hyper-localized design for every shop Starbucks builds is impossible. After all, Starbucks is a business, and businesses need to make money. “We know we can’t just go in and overspend,” Sleeth says. “We can’t turn every store into a flagship.” He says that Starbucks balances their design spend on the level of projected income a store is going to earn. So a shop that’s slated to be a big earner, like the one in New Orleans, will get more personalized touches than, say, a shop in York, Nebraska.

That’s not to say the designers don’t take care with every store they open. Sleeth and his team have been working to revamp the company’s standard kit—the parts that show up in most every Starbucks store on the planet. You’re always going to see the “school house” chair, a sturdy wooden seat with an upright back. You’ll see warm-colored ottomans, wooden tables and banquets. “We want it to feel custom, but we need to be able to scale it,” he says. “Because we do a lot of projects in a year.”

Much of the mass customization comes in the form of colors and materials. For example, in Miami and Los Angeles, the design team is more likely to use a lighter palette of colors to reflect the abundance of sunlight. Southern cities need furniture that is cool to sit on, and beachy locations need durable furniture to account for the sand that gets tracked in. “We were looking at how the floor had worn over 10 years because people were walking in with sand on their feet,” Sleeth says about a store in Miami.

Still, Starbucks is actively working to test and roll out more its concept stores, with its main focus right now on the pre-fab drive-thru stores made from shipping containers. The concept, originally executed in Washington and inspired by the shipping containers Starbucks employees saw out their windows, uses pre-fabricated materials that can be delivered on a truck, lowered into place.

So far they’ve built 11 of these modular stores around the country, which may not sound like much in the grand Starbucks scheme. But in a few years, drive-thru stores will account for around 60 percent of shops Starbucks plans to build, a good chunk of which will use this same pre-fabricated method. “The push for innovation and design is just starting,” Sleeth says. “This is the tip of the iceberg.”