visitors completely organically
views for the videos
baristas spreading the word
during Slush Helsinki
servings of better coffee at Slush Helsinki
Project links:
- → View the website
- → Videos on Youtube
- → @forbettercoffee
"At our shop Freese Coffee in Helsinki we work hard to make people happy", Kalle says. "They come in, enjoy delicious coffee with genuine hospitality and leave happier. But we can fit only a handful of people in our little shop."
This is why we created For Better Coffee. It is our new platform to empower and help people to brew and drink exponentially better coffee, at home and at work, with family and friends. Better coffee for million people.
We also believe that great coffee cannot be produced in second-rate conditions. To make the coffee taste amazing means that the journey from the tree to your cup has been equally amazing. In other words, For Better Coffee means better for everyone: the producer, the environment, you and your family.
A different approach to coffee
We had a fairly limited budget on building For Better Coffee, and actually most of the work was done pro bono for the name of business development. This meant we really had to concentrate on our core strengths and use them well. An obvious approach was to use Kalle's persona and knowledge to tell the story for better coffee.
For Better Coffee 1.0 consists of the website designed to inspire and engage, Youtube channel to test the market demand of instructional video content for better coffee, and naturally @forbettercoffee accounts on Twitter, Instagram and a Facebook page. Our strategy was to use all of these to support the launch of brand with nine physical coffee bars with 120 baristas serving 15 000 startup enthusiasts, media and investors at Slush Helsinki. This worked well as the videos gathered over 10 000 views in relatively short time on completely organic manner, while Kalle himself got featured on both Helsingin Sanomat and Huvudstadstbladet, two local newspapers serving both Finnish and Swedish speaking population in Finland.
→ Take a look at the Youtube channel
For Better Coffee has a strong, playful and visual identity that was made possible with the help of illustration duo Craig & Karl and their agency Pekka. It was clear from the get go that we wanted to make a long, scrolling animation that would emphasize the story of a coffee bean from a cup to the mug, while enabling us to tell our story through Five Laws to Better Coffee by Kalle.
In order to maintain the experience simple and concise, the website is just a single scrolling page telling the story. No frills, no extras coating. Everything else happened over on Youtube and twitter. We took special care to make something that works well across all devices from a tiny smartphone to a desktop computer — how we did this was impressive enough to inspire an excellent deconstruction at Website Deconstructions.
Launch
For Better Coffee was launched at Slush Helsinki, the largest startup event in Europe. Freese Coffee Co operated the near endless caffeine supply for the whole three day festival crowd and established For Better Coffee presence with a firm grip. Our brand and web address spread organically through tweets, pictures and 100 000 coffee cups used during the festival.
We were excited about the success of our launch. Main reason why we did the launch this way was that in true lean manner we also wanted to test the overall concept with the our target demographic. In retrospect, this could have not worked better.
IMAGE PSFK, Sprudge, It's Nice That, Reddit…
Published at
- → SiteInspire
- → One Page Love
- → It's Nice That
- → LayerVault
- → PSFK
- → Sprudge
Our site was received well throughout the blogosphere and most importantly this validated our concept of helping people make better coffee. The site had 60 000 unique, organic visitors in relatively short time, and was feature in several coffee and lifestyle blogs for it’s idea, design and content, ranking at #2 on Google Sites for "better coffee".
Oh my, so cute!! I wish all of the endless scroll sites were this delightful (and I'm not even a coffee drinker!): http://t.co/WfJ3nanImI
— mandadenn (@mandadenn) December 16, 2014
Best webpage in 2015 so far: http://t.co/KMjGKlfuWj http://t.co/sBqi1ew7Lw
— Gerda Aleks (@AleksGerda) January 29, 2015
Beautifully designed site on how to make better coffee. #UI #UX http://t.co/58ufkUD6a7
— Melissa Perri (@lissijean) December 16, 2014
We are really happy with this project and it's outcomes. We achieved something quite beautiful with scarce resources. At the same time, it's a just start, a minimum viable product for Kalle on his way of being Jamie Oliver of coffee.
Most importantly, we're just getting started… so the journey continues.
IMAGE Forbetter.coffee works seamlessly on all major screens and devices.
Team
Freese Coffee
Client, content design
Kalle Freese
Isa Verschraegen
Nordkapp
Digital design & production
Sami Niemelä
Aki Happonen
Shakti Dash
Agent Pekka
Creative Director,
brand design
Pablo Steffa
Craig & Karl
Illustrations
Craig Redman
Karl Maier
Klok
Video production & social media
Satu Suomi
Teemu Välkkynen
Pauli Kopu
Matias Nystedt
Jesse Braun
