The café blends an incredible brick-and-mortar customer experience with a groundbreaking technology lab. Our experiments streamline processes for baristas and chefs, providing hotter and fresher food for customers.

We’re currently experimenting with an order fulfillment technology that sends orders to Apple Watches worn by baristas, to be completed based on multivariate prioritization technology we’re building. We’re doing this to prove our hypothesis that while consumers are still figuring out a role for the Apple Watch in their lives, there are a lot of immediate service applications in the retail space. Proving that this works on a smaller scale allows us to implement innovations throughout our clients’ businesses.

Although the café has been open for only six months, our M.O. for the innovation is a state of perpetual beta. We’re constantly testing a number of prototypes and have as many as five pilots or beta programs running in tandem at any time.

Among the first programs to beta is a frictionless order and fulfillment model that leverages end-user applications for order-ahead functionality, all connected to wearables worn by the baristas. With geo-tracked ordering technology, baristas are able to prep each order based on GPS speed and estimated arrival time. And to make the whole system tick, we built custom cloud-based software that seamlessly links the mobile app, the baristas’ wearables, and wireless point-of-sale.

We are also beta testing a coffee subscription program that will offer easy refills courtesy of NFC-enabled mugs.

Our constant goal for the café is to help businesses to leverage the future of anticipatory design. Since it’s an ever-evolving vision, we need to develop multiple approaches at once. All of our ideas are built to be modular, scalable and flexible—whether it’s in our retail footprint or for our client partners. We’re currently in the process of scaling one of our pilots across a large tech and retail brand’s business.

We can innovate retail experiences in a controlled environment and not be burdened or slowed down by legacy tech, technical debt, dated processes or operational overheads. The core business is operating profitably: we have five active pilots, three of which are involved with an active client/innovation partner.

As a global agency, we partner with the word’s best-known brands on their most challenging initiatives. To stay ahead of the innovation curve, we opened a café, which serves gourmet food and beverage, while also functioning as an R&D lab for our agency.

We developed the brand identity, interior design, UX and software development. Our objective wasn’t to open a café, but to create an environment at the intersection of retail, food/beverage, and customer service where the future of retail technology and anticipatory design could be tested. We interact with customers daily, gaining valuable insight for our agency and clients.

We launched the café with the belief that taking on the responsibilities of running an actual retail business would not only provide us with a real world environment to prototype and experiment with new technology, but would also give our employees a real appreciation for the stakes and realities of operating in these environments. The future of digital and physical interaction requires experiences to not only accommodate immediate user needs, but to also intelligently prompt future solutions for users.

Complete control of the digital and physical retail footprint allows us to explore user motivation, product & service delivery, and customer service in real-time. Control of the entire experience also minimizes the creative and technological limitations and restrictions often imposed by client work. We’re committed to making this a profitable endeavor so the retail and R&D can become a sustainable part of our business.