business

Starbucks Grande Café and Roastery in Shanghai

By Delphine Hirasuna |

If you think that when you’ve seen one Starbucks cafe, you’ve seen them all, you need to visit the Starbucks Roastery and Reserve Tasting Room in Shanghai. The Starbucks signature mermaid and green brand elements are underplayed to the point of not being noticeable. Elegant wood and gleaming copper finishes adorn the 30,000-square-foot establishment, staffed by 400 employees. The place feels like “Disneyland” for caffeine lovers.

The sights are awesome and entertaining! A towering copper cask, adorned with more than 1,000 traditional Chinese chops (stamps) hand-engraved to narrate the story of Starbucks and coffee. A ceiling made out of 10,000 handmade hexagonal wooden tiles, inspired by the locking of an espresso shot on an espresso machine. A Roastery featuring three wood-carved bars, one of which is 88 feet long, where customers can watch beans being roasted and baristas brewing coffee using six different methods and beans from 30 countries. If that isn’t enough, an integrated AR system, built with an Alibaba web app, lets customers immerse themselves in the space through their smartphones. There is also specially crafted nitrogen-infused teas at the tea bar, and an on-site bakery offering scrumptious artisanal baked goods by famed Italian baker, Rocco Princi acclaimed from Milan to London.

With a population of 24 million people just in the city of Shanghai, even a gigantic Starbucks store can’t serve all the locals. Shanghai already has 600 other Starbucks cafes in the city, and 3,000 locations in 136 Chinese cities, with one new Starbucks location opening in China every 15 hours.

Posters

The Backstory of “Keep Calm and Carry On” Posters

By Delphine Hirasuna |

“Keep Calm and Carry On” is the most famous British World War II poster that few people knew about until a half century later. Virtually all of the 2.5 million copies printed in anticipation of plastering the UK with them when war broke out, never saw the light of day.

It all started in the spring of 1939, as England braced itself for a German invasion. To prepare citizens for that inevitability, the UK Ministry of Information (MOI) formed a Home Publicity Committee made up of civil servants, volunteer academics, publicists and publishers to plan a campaign urging citizens to keep a “stiff upper lip.” The committee met weekly over lunch hour and suggested various slogans — e.g, “England Is Prepared” and “We’re Going to See This Through.” The committee proposed a series of seven or more morale-boosting posters, which the Treasury vetoed due to cost, giving them less than half of their requested budget. Ultimately, the MOI settled on three poster messages: “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory”; “Freedom Is In Peril, Defend It With All Your Might,” and “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Someone suggested “Keep Calm, Don’t Panic,” but that was nixed.

Read More »

Sustainability

Tackling the Plastic Problem, One Supermarket Aisle at a Time

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Plastic may be cheap and convenient, but there is mounting evidence that it is killing the planet and all the inhabitants on it. According to Ecowatch, today there are 500 times more pieces of microplastic in the sea than there are stars in our galaxy. By 2050, it is estimated that there will be more plastic in our oceans than fish. Enough plastic is thrown away each year to circle the earth four times. Plastic constitutes about 90 percent of the trash floating on the ocean’s surface. One million seabirds and over 100,000 marine mammals are killed each year from plastics in the ocean. Plastic chemicals can be absorbed by humans too – 93 percent of Americans age 6 and older test positive for BPA, a harmful hormone-altering plastic chemical. Some retailers are not giving up in despair, but are addressing the disposable plastics problem one aisle at a time.

Read More »

Lacoste Alligator Yields to Endangered Species

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Lacoste’s familiar white polo shirts is swapping out its signature embroidered green alligator logo temporarily for ten endangered animals to raise awareness and help conservation efforts. The limited edition “Save Our Species” polos made their debut at the recent Paris Fashion Show, and include the Vaquita porpoise, Sumatran tiger, Anegada ground iguana, California condor, Kakapo parrot, Saola ox, Northern sportive lemur, Burmese roofed turtle, Javan rhino, and Cao-vit gibbon.

Created in partnership with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (ICUN), the Save Our Species Lacoste shirts have been produced in very limited number – 1,775 in total. The number of shirts produced for each species corresponds with the population of each species still surviving in the wild. For instance, only 30 polos will be made featuring the Vaquita porpoise, and 67 for the Javan rhino. The extremely scarce polo shirts, costing roughly $183 each, will be available for as long as they last from ICUN’s Save Our Species site.

Posters

Poster Show Promotes Tolerance

By Delphine Hirasuna |

For centuries, wall posters have been a favorite means to publicize events, products, causes, political movements and the like. It is a sad commentary on the 21st century that we need to use this public vehicle to draw attention to an idea as basic as Tolerance. Unfortunately, we do.

“Tolerance” is the name and theme of a traveling poster show that is now circling the globe. Organized by Bosnian-born and now New York-based, Mirko Ilic, the Tolerance Traveling Poster Show features the contributions of renowned designers including Milton Glaser (USA), Chaz Maviyana-Davies (Zimbabwe), Yuko Shimizu (Japan), Manuel Estrada (Spain), Tarek Atrissi (Lebanon), Jianping Ha (China), and some two dozen others.

To keep the exhibition accessible to a broad audience, the posters are shown in public plazas, shopping malls, parks, and other open venues instead of in art galleries and art museums. Conceived to be electronically produced and hung anywhere in the world within a week, the Tolerance posters show is expected to run for two years. To date, it has been shown on nearly every continent, with illustrators and designers from exhibiting countries contributing their own Tolerance poster to the show.

Read More »