Coffee & Clothes Serves Up a Menu of Promos
Every artist has a medium. Ryan Glick’s just happens to be the foam on a caffe latte.
Glick in 2014 launched Coffee ‘n Clothes as an Instagram account. It’s since grown into a marketing firm whose caffeinated activations bring a jolt of energy to fashion and lifestyle brands’ events.
Related stories
Chanel at the Oscars: 13 Iconic Karl Lagerfeld-Designed Red Carpet Looks
Castiglionis Build Plan C, Open First Flagship in Japan
Fendi Pays Tribute to Karl Lagerfeld at Fall 2019 Show
“When I moved to New York, I was into coffee bars, and I love fashion,” Glick said, explaining the connection between beans and seams. “Coffee ‘n Clothes took off as a hashtag. It started out as a side project. Now, brands hire us on both coasts.”
Coffee ‘n Clothes is starting a weekend gig at Joe’s Jeans’ location in Manhattan’s SoHo, where blue lattes in denim cups will be poured through April. During the recent New York Fashion Week, Coffee ‘n Clothes took over the cafe at Marc Jacobs’ Madison Avenue flagship and handed out matcha and charcoal lattes with the designer’s logo writ on the foam.
“We used our designer lattes and help drive traffic to the store,” Glick said. “Marc Jacobs also used our influencer network to promote the space throughout the week.”
The company has mastered latte logos from Supreme’s red-and-white moniker to Nike’s Cortez sneaker, a white shoe with a red swoosh and green sole that was celebrated at pop-up coffee stations in two of the brand’s New York stores.
Coffee ‘n Clothes is opening it’s own cafe at Showfields, the 14,000-square-foot retailer in NoLIta with rotating pop-up shops for wellness, home and design. It will operate there for six months to a year, with Glick eventually styling the cafe as a handbag or sneaker bar with products from StockX, a web site billed as the stock market for sneakers, which also sells pre-owned luxury products.
Some of Glick’s merchandising ideas can be seen on coffeenclothes.com, which uses virtual reality to give consumers a panoramic view of the “store.” Besides Coffee ‘n Clothes-branded beans, Upruit sparkling cold-brew coffees, and Bodum’s Chambord Fresh press, the virtual store features among other things, Common Projects’ tournament leather sneakers, $405; Chanel’s Double Flap quilted maxi, $6,000 and Fendi’s Kan 1 shoulder bag, $2,390, and Jimmy Choo’s Romy 60 heels, $650. Products are supplied by StockX and link back to that e-commerce site for purchase.
“Cool cafes already exist. We’re a bridge between fashion and beauty brands and coffee,” Glick said. “Brands want experiences. We’re developing pop-ups and cafes for different brands. This is just the beginning of pop-up shops. We’re figuring out what else can you do. What’s the 2.0 version — something with augmented reality.
“The next step is augmented reality,” Glick added. “We brought to life product on our web site and it’s all shoppable. The model isn’t dead. There’s still a lot of opportunity.”
Get more from WWD: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Newsletter
