In parallel to 4 teams of students, a team of creative practitioners and teachers also worked on this task, however unlike the students there was only a short amount of time available in which to tackle it. The purpose of this page is to show our effort and our approach to solving the task so that others may see the process in action and learn from our mistakes!
Creative Challenge - Teacher’s Response - February 2021
Ways of Innovating a Local Café
A local café (Cortado in Bath) were so helpful in joining a creativity for innovation class and offering a challenge for us. Their café has had a very challenging year, opening just weeks before the March 2020 COVID lockdown. However despite this they’ve had a good year, adapting to the changing environment and COVID rules. But they are keen to look to the future, see if they could be doing something better or whether they are missing opportunities to grow and innovate.
The owners are from Argentina and the UK, there is an Argentinian twist to the food and drinks they serve. They’re part of the new coffee trend, with high quality coffee, baristas, good social media following, and a clean ‘skandi’ coffee shop aesthetic.
Areas of insight obtained from the café founder during our introductory zoom call:
Despite all the challenges the business is fine, so let’s not risk everything through aggressive growth plans
Currently operate a breakfast and lunch service, no evening hours at the moment because they’d need more staff and with a young family the hours they work are probably quite high already.
Very keen on building a community with their customers.
Interested to look for growth opportunities but not keen to become a chain.
Our approach:
The basic approach used was after the initial brief from Cortado, we would work in our own time to conduct additional research, develop some concepts (for no more than an hour perhaps in several sittings) then come back together and discuss our thinking. At that point we’d then separate again to develop these ideas further. Coming back together for a final coherent pitch.
Unfortunately on this occasion we ran out of time to iterate the ideas further, so here is our thinking and research so far.
Ed’s thinking:
First things first, we need to visit the location (physically or virtually) to try and get a feel for the place. Also with the team working remotely (one in London and another in Holland) it’s important to share this initial research with the rest of the group.
So I went to explore the business itself, where are they situated, how is it working inside, how is the layout, what they serve and sell etc…
First Idea Session - 25 minutes
My preferred creative method, is to conduct several short idea generating session. Rarely longer than 25 minutes at a time, unless I’m really on a role. It’s tiring coming up with ideas and I find they become harder after an initial rush. So stop, take a breadth, let your unconscious mind do some processing and come back at it again later.
Outcomes from this first session:
Straight away I was finding it difficult without a clear problem to tackle. The business was currently doing alright so I didn’t want to suggest anything too reckless that would jeopardise this.
A business like this I would describe as a ‘marathon’ business. Thousands of people could all do the same thing in the same place and when times are good they might all do absolutely fine. But when times get tough, only the most robust runners will get through it. So in order for Cortado to lift themselves out of this marathon situation and make themselves more resilient, they must work on ways to stand out from the competition. Like the fancy dress runner in a marathon, Cortado needs to be memorable, to do something differently, in order to change the rules of their competitive game.
Although more research was needed my thinking was converging on ways Cortado could focus on the idea of building a stronger community of loyal local customers. This fits strongly with the founder’s vision and will keep the business successful even if there’s another huge shock to the system. In 2020 tourist numbers vanished overnight. In a normal year Bath would get as many tourists as Romania, but with COVID this dropped to almost nothing and many forgettable Bath businesses that rely on passing trade and tourists have suffered.
Follow on research and thinking about what would make Cortado stand out among Bath’s similar coffee shops:
Second Idea Session - 20 minutes
Giving myself time to sleep on the problem and conduct some research helped free up some more ideas and converged my thinking around the community drive. Main themes and ideas from the session were:
Ideas around tweaking the colour scheme and vibe of the shop slightly
Changing the layout to make room and a clear distinction for a ‘Cortado Market’ as well as a ‘Cortado Café’. The market will sell more unique products, cortado own branded items and could make them more of regular destination for locals. If this was proving popular and the situation became available, the opportunity to expand sideways into Brora could be a great one.
Changing the tables and chairs to larger ‘family’ style rustic tables and benches, this reinforces the community aspect and also gives the place more of an individual and memorable character.
Running perhaps one evening a week (so it’s not too stressful for the team) where the extended ‘Cortado Family’ and staff can relax with South American wine, new types of coffee, Argentinian tapas, music etc… This is an opportunity for staff and regular customers to meet and socialise.
Changing the loyalty card away from a free coffee to free entry to the Cortado Family night.
Operating a book corner, books perhaps on a south American or environmental theme, to reinforce the passions of the staff.
The books, wine nights etc… to be run in partnership with book and wine shops in Bath rather than done independently. This would hopefully reduce costs and risk.
Alisha’s thinking:
Like Ed she also went for a walk down to Cortado and experienced the café, noticing that most of the items for sale were either not labelled or not priced. So making decisions of what to buy on an impulse was hard to do or slowed the process down as you needed to ask.
Ideas generated converged around ways of improving this and also how to build a community and subscriptions business model approach. Could Cortado learn from Pret’s new initiative and implement something similar?
There was also thoughts and advice on how to increase their social media impact and increase followings.
Ian’s thinking:
Like Ed and Alisha, Ian also found this stage of the process harder than he expected because we hadn’t converged on a clear problem or need yet. His process would normally aim for an idea every 30 seconds.
The wider and broader the brief, the harder the task. This was made harder still by Ian being based in London and unable to visit the café himself.
Our aim was to have chosen the specific area we focused on at a group meeting (shown at the bottom of the page) and then repeat the whole process again now that we’ve got more focus.
Emma’s thinking:
An extensive research trip into the café trying to uncover all the little inconsistencies and ways things could be improved, but also to really try and get under the skin of the business to understand how they work, how the present themselves and how they represent their values.
Initial research shown above, initial idea generation shown below
Design Review Meeting
After all of this, we would now have a review meeting where we share all our different research, insights, thoughts, hunches, ideas, concepts, data and problems so that we might be able to form a common direction of travel for the project.
If we had more time, we would have ideally now repeated the whole process again, each going away to generate ideas on this idea and how we can better make it a reality. However with only a limited time available we’ve had to stop there.
Things of note from this process:
We each had a different way of working and by working separately and then coming together that allows each of use to work to our strengths.
Our research is all different but we all come to the same broad conclusions.
Working without a clear problem was difficult, yet following the review meeting the direction we believe is now clear and it's easier now to have more ideas.
The idea generation process never stops, during the review meeting Ian recorded another 14 or so ideas and we all discussed new ideas that came to us in the moment. I’m sure since writing this up I (and I’d suspect the rest of the team) have had many more too.
Our Conclusion
The review meeting was perhaps a little dominated by my thoughts, but if we had had more time to repeat the idea generation process this would have had less of an impact on our decision making processes as we’d have had time to go away and develop the ideas in our own way. However if forced and against this tight deadline, I’d have to say our consensus view of what Cortado should do is:
A quick COVID compliant change that would increase throughput and revenue now whilst also increasing customer satisfaction:
From all our research we agree that a problem that could be solved is the waiting time currently for orders.
Each customer must politely wait outside, politely wait for the person being served to leave, then come in, chit chat, browse, order, wait, pay and leave. There’s a lot of wasted time.
If items for sale were moved to the window, browsing could take place whilst people queued outside.
If instead of going in, orders were taken at the door, more orders could be taken at multiple people in the queue at once. WIth multiple food and drink orders being prepared in parallel.
So whilst this would work best on sunny dry days, Cortado could make more use of it’s eye catching and large awning at the front to provide rain shelter for waiting customers.
This would rapidly increase throughput of orders and prevent customers being put off by a long, slow moving queue.
Longer term plans and aspirations, ideally once COVID and strict social distancing is no longer an issue:
Modify the layout to create a more open communal area.
Refresh the tables and chairs to make them more characterful of the intended design aesthetic (skandi modern but with a slight south American rustic twist).
Bring the goods for sale items together into a ‘Cortado Market’ format (similar in format, but different goods, to the COVID adapted Landrace Bakery), organised together, clearly labelled, priced and stocked with lots of unique items, homemade goods or books and items from local bookshops and suppliers.
When pandemic allowed, operate a monthly (increasing if popular) invitation only ‘supper club’ style ‘Cortado Family’ night where staff can hang out and relax with customers. Serving coffee, wine and food. Perhaps a free glass of something as you arrive but then you pay for food and others. Good opportunity to sell market goods as well. Could be a launchpad for more regular events (Topping & co Style).
Change the loyalty cards away from giving away free items to being a Wonka Golden Ticket to one of the above Cortado Family nights. No entry without one, restricting access to just the most loyal of customers. Most of us don’t need a free coffee after all, lets make something more memorable instead.
A ‘buy one, give one’ initiative… buy two hot drinks and one (or perhaps some food instead) is kept on account for someone less fortunate in need.