Make Decent Coffee

  • Donna Dew
Make Decent Coffee is an e-commerce website UCC Coffee launched. It has the goal of making it super easy for people to make great coffee without the need for expensive equipment. To introduce the concept they had arranged for a 10x6m spot at The London Coffee Festival.

The London Coffee Festival is a 4 day event in London. Over 20,000 coffee lovers go there every year - that is a lot of potential customers! It was crucial that the stand was engaging as possible. Make Decent Coffee wanted to be able to interact with the attendees and get them doing what their namesake says - Making Decent Coffee.

I was lead designer on this project. The concept was to apply a homely, living area feel to our industrial surroundings. In the centre there were to be tables with live demonstrations of coffee making techniques. This would be both engaging and educational for visitors.

I used illustrations - printed as vinyls - to add elements such as curtains, bookcases, shelves and lamps. I then combined this with seating (there is never enough seating at these events) and screen-printed cushions. This helped to create a cool & trendy looking space which stood from the other stands.

I co-ordinated with a number of printing companies to ensure we had everything ready on time. We also used a bunch of IKEA furntiure, which meant a long morning of assembling flat pack furniture to get started.
We ran a small shop for people to buy coffee equipment and Make Decent Coffee merchandise. This proved to be far more popular than we had anticipated and spent most of the weekend very low on stock.

The stand was very well received. We won two awards: Favourite Key Feature and Most Engaging Stand Experience.