How Starbucks Used Creative Thinking to “Act Local”

My resources for this blog include Wired’s article “With Stunning New Stores, Starbucks Has a New Design Strategy: Act Local” by Liz Stinson published on January 8th, 2014.

As we all know, Starbucks is one of the largest coffee chains in the world. Today, there are more than 18,000 shops worldwide. According to an article from Wired, they began closing around 600 stores in 2008 due to a 2007 economic crash. This caused them to rethink some of their creative thinking into a complete re-brand.

How does a corporate company become “authentic”?

Starbucks saw the issue. They began polling their customers to find out what the people really wanted. It turns out, many people were starting to associate Starbucks with fast food. Customers were turned off by the repetition of Starbucks stores; so Starbucks started looking into a new design for their shops.

Starbucks wanted its stores to reflect the community that they were set in. So, they started doing just that. They started developing a locally relevant design for each of their stores. Starbucks started reaching out to local artists to pitch in designs, paintings, and murals to place in their stores. In New Orleans, they commissioned artist Matthew Glac to make a brass-instrument chandelier, as seen in the picture below.

As the designers became more familiar with their surroundings, they began to incorporate the communities’ stories into the designs. Designers even work with artists to make furniture from reclaimed basketball court wood at the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn. Thoughtful touches like these not only give attention to cultural observations, but they also help make the worldwide company feel quite local.

Not only did the designers give attention to aesthetic design, but also how they wanted the user experience to be. Bill Sleeth, Starbuck’s vice president of design for the Americas said:

“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”.

This observation drove the designers to place more individual stools in the shops, so people could drag them around, creating group seating areas. Much of the 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 would have furniture that is cool to sit on, and beachy locations need durable furniture for the sand that gets tracked in.

The ideation of design can get put into many different aspects of a product, especially in relation to a big corporate company. The most important takeaway from Starbucks' efforts to redesign its stores comes from the community and what it has to offer. Getting inspired from what you have around you is key to making things feel at home for consumers. Its what all companies should try and do, as user experience and design can make or break a companies identity.