Our business is branded engagement, creating moments and experiences around coffee, drinks and snacks at exhibitions and other events. We understand the importance of eye contact, face-to-face meeting, and the power of a sharing act accompanied by a smile.

We train our Rockstars carefully, not just in how to make delicious coffee, drinks and food, but also in customer service skills, and they learn how to make people feel welcome and how to put them at ease. And we extend this thinking to the design of our coffee and snack bars.

Fundamentally, we build the back shelf of our bars lower than everyone else, especially our coffee bars. Modern coffee machines can be enormous, and once you’ve stacked cups on top, you’ve built a big barrier to engagement, with baristas left to peek over the top, where only the tallest customers are visible.

As you can imagine, this isn’t a gift to engagement or customer service, so in our bar designs, we lower our work surfaces from the standard height of about 80cm to below 70cm. The difference a mere 10cm makes is surprising, opening up the bar in an immediately more open and accessible space, and giving our Rockstars an opportunity to do what they do best  – make everyone feel welcome and special. Of course, sometimes we’re limited by having to use pre-installed bars and counters, but wherever we can, we try and make everyone a bit more visible to one another.

It works. There’s no question in my mind that dropping the height of the bars to keep sightlines open makes a huge difference to the look and feel of the stand overall. Compared to ours, other coffee bars at exhibitions begin to look like they’ve been defensively barricaded, with only the tops of the baristas’ heads visible bobbing up and down behind walls of steel topped with stacked cups. Barmotion coffee bars, by contrast, look positively inviting and welcoming.