Nespresso Life
Nespresso goes green with retail experiences.
Nespresso goes green with retail experiences.
I remember when we received the first brief for the Nespresso’s LIFE project. It was an ambitious project that could let us develop really interesting products and they could potentially evolve during the upcoming years.
Nespresso needed to shift their communication to focus on sustainability and green marketing, emphasizing their AAA Sustainability Quality Program. For that reason they contacted us to develop a number of actions that would help the brand develop this green objective on their social media, web and physical stores too. In that sense, the different markets all over the world could be eligible to accomodate these actions.
And so far they’d done it widely.
Creative Direction, Art Direction, Design, Prototype
Nespresso Central
2019-2021
Interactive Map for retail and web tool
Connected furniture for retail
Social Media visual campaign
Photoshooting
360 Video for retail
Motion Video
The first project we developed was an interactive dashboard. In that sense, the (TripleA) AAA Dashboard or “Positive Cup” needed to accomodate huge amounts of data coming from Nespresso’s internal database and craft them in a nice, compelling way for the users at the boutiques, so they can interact with the map in 4k touch screens.
The interactive dashboard will be placed on the Nespresso stores around the world (currently in 4 big cities), and their objective was to put in place their AAA Sustainable Quality Program, which is to provide a maximum of information about the farms, the farmers, the different coffees, and ultimately show how the brand helped developed the communities of coffee producers all over the globe.
Challenge accepted.
It all started with a huge phase of studying technical possibilities of connecting to Nespresso’s internal blockchain data. From there we started working in a UX level the different user journeys, main functionalities and interface architecture.
The tool needed to have 2 different scenarios: the first was a b2c approach for people that enters the store. The second was more for Nespresso’s internal use, known as “coffee specialists”.
That meant that it impacted on the design aspects of certain things such as the size of typography, images and icons. The “Coffee Specialist” mode was supposed to be used for presentations in store, so the final users will be at a certain distance (2 or 3 meters) from the screen. On the other side, on the “standard use” for people on the stores, the users will be placed just a few centimeters from the screen, so the size of the elements should be adapted to this scenario.
In terms of access one or another, the access to the Coffee Specialist mode was hidden in a corner of the screen, where regular user should not be able to reach.
As the project started as a touch screen in stores, we have to adapt some of our web ways of thinking that we were used to, to a more standing, big-device, tactile-screen approach. For instance we started with a more wide approach to place the different navigations. We envisioned 3 main areas to place content : on the left hand side of the screen would be the Stories; on the right hand would be the Coffees area; and on the bottom center the About AAA Program.
It didn’t work.
Our first approach was more a web vision of the product. We actually needed to review the UX architecture, as it must have all the main info at the center of the screen. The users on the store will be standing, in front of the screen and at the center. Meaning we needed to place the main navigation at the bottom center, keeping the sides for secondary or residual information.
Finally we envisioned “safe areas” where we imagined users could reach easily, and in that sense we placed the main informations inside that areas.
After our first tests in real stores we found out that not all users inside the boutiques didn’t necessarily interact much with the screen as they were not sure they could touch the actual screens and interact with them.
To increase interaction and time on-screen we developed different screensavers with clear messages to interact with the screen and to show what they could find inside of the experience.
The product in the boutiques started to show good results and the client saw the potential of the project. They asked us to evolve the retail experience into an internal tool that they could use to communicate internally and with their stakeholders or eventual Press demands.
The product will evolve to a web tool, with a specific CMS that fits their demands, especially to manipulate different types of documents such as MS Excel or Gsheets.
As per 2021 we started developing it and we are still on the conception phase. More info to come.
The overall experience in-store needed a specific action for the recycling capsules that users gets to the store every single day.
What we called the “Recycling Corner” consists of a custom-made weight scale in a form of a drawer that users could introduce their bags of used capsules, weight them, and finally get a result through a small screen where they could see how much their bag weights and what kind of product Nespresso could build with the amount recycled.
In order to deliver efficiently the final product we needed to develop a wide range of different products, really different from one another - especially in terms of technology.
For starters we needed to concieve the weight tool and the furniture/drawer that comes with. Alongside we engineered from scratch a small program developed through a Raspberry Pi to read the weights and launch a series of dynamic pages with videos to show the results.
That was something the Agency didn’t developed before, but we weren’t afraid of the unknown and we developed a product that nowadays is deployed in more than 30 countries and +90 cities around the planet.
The internal Nespresso’s blockchain offered us the opportunity to have access to footage videos shot on different coffee farms all over the globe.
At the beginning our approach was to shoot VR videos so after we could play them at the stores. Unfortunately the project shifted to a 360 videos for different reasons (budget, technologies underdeveloped in some countries).
One of the challenges was also to see how could we confront hygiene issues on Covid era. Have specific VR headsets to be shared in all the boutiques was not a good idea.
Finally, the 360 videos played in a smartphone inside a customised Google Cardboard with a one-use lifespan. All in all it did a great job and the product is widely used also on the selected stores.
Back in 2017 Nespresso asked us to show their authenticity and commitment to sustainability.
We created the concept of Cloud Farms, to create a relationship between the consumers and the farmers in a unique way.
We sent cameras to 6 different farms all over the world (2x Colombia, Costa Rica, Indonesia & Ethiopia) and we asked to tell their own story, not just about the coffee they produce, but about their way of life, their philosophy, their passion.
We shared a long-term story about themselves through 3 touchpoints: Instagram; on a website at Nespresso’s platform; and on their boutiques. It was the seed to produce afterwards the AAA Dashboard.
The project lasted more than 2 years, producing more than 300 assets on social media and +10000 visitors on the web.
