Starbucks: Buy a train ticket for the coffee shop

Just see "Starbucks Mobile Store" This nickname, Time line June a bit scared: the café inside and outside, from the payment, membership, take-away, store music download even to the digital alarm clock service, not all have been connected to move the end? Mobile Store "What's the problem? Do you want to put the whole store in the car?

As a result, Starbucks actually put a store in the car! or the train! Want to go on a trip and have a nice cup of coffee? The Swiss who love the little train have had their dreams come true recently.

11 years ago, Starbucks opened its first European store in Switzerland, and now the fairy-tale country has become another first-ever train store in the company's history. Well, of course it's completely mobile than any mobile terminal!

In partnership with the Swiss Federal railroads (SBB), Starbucks tried to run the Starbucks Small train store on 21st this month, between Geneva airport and Gallen. The two-decker train can hold 50 guests. The car has a Starbucks signature wooden table, leather chair and coffee maker around the green apron.

"It's really not a cushy job," said Starbucks concept designer Liz Muller, which has never been designed to get people to drink in a store, but to pay special attention to the "Unicom" store experience.

Therefore, the challenge of design is to integrate all the Starbucks elements into this huge, moving back-and-forth vehicle. This means that designers should consider the weight, power supply, fire safety and other more stringent indicators, but also to ensure that the window table, comfortable seat design, to fit the scene inside the train.

In one word: Starbucks designers want to build a new social platform within the framework of this traditional vehicle.

The design team started with a lot of naïve ideas, because they never designed the train, but soon the reality forced everyone to learn and compromise. For example, they found that you rarely see wooden tables on trains because wood is flammable.

In order to put the Starbucks signature wooden table into the train, they have to work on the wood first: the wood to do fire retardant treatment, and to do as thin as possible, because the less wood, the less kindling.

"We designed a new seat with a light cream color and a deep cream color," he said. Muller said: "I have done 8 of each, and then they will light these chairs." In this test, if you get high score, you can pass. "These are the strange experiences of the previous Starbucks store design.

Finally, the designers successfully put 50 seats into the train. For different travellers, there are different interesting seating arrangements: Passengers who arrive at the destination at a few stops can pick up a stool nap at the bar, and long distance passengers can go upstairs, sit in comfortable armchairs or share a large table that can talk to each other.

It is worth noting that, unlike most Starbucks "fixed" stores, there are waiters in the small train store! He'll bring you the food you ordered upstairs so you don't have to climb down with coffee in the moving car.

Overall, the store's design, the continued mobility of the environment, space constraints and more stringent security considerations, and so on, so that Muller and colleagues have to integrate functional and aesthetic more seamless to do: "This should be one of the smallest coffee shop we have ever designed!"

In an era when more and more people equate the journey with destination, Starbucks ' interesting new store seems to be giving another promise: the journey itself can be as full of meaning as a destination.

"I sometimes wonder, will the guests think so much?" Muller said. Of course not, because, good design is not to let people unaware!