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Courier Weekly provides inspiration and tools to help you work better and live smarter.
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Brought to you this week by Atelier100.
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Your weekly round-up of briefings, trends and news.
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The business of bar takeovers
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On a Sunday night in March, bartenders from three of London's most iconic bars packed up their cocktail shakers and turned up to work hundreds of miles away from their homes. Staff from the Connaught Bar (famous for its martinis), Lyaness (run by bartender Ryan Chetiyawardana, known for his unusual, homemade ingredients) and Satan's Whiskers (an east London dive-style bar) were in Barcelona to take over three bars on the same street. For Moe Aljaff, the co-founder of those three bars â Two Schmucks, Fat Schmuck and Lucky Schmuck â it was the biggest takeover he'd ever pulled off.
You've probably seen something similar at your favorite cocktail spot â guest shifts and takeovers are commonplace in the modern bar industry. Bartenders from one side of the world will travel to the other to spend a night serving their drinks in another person's bar. It means guests are treated to the hospitality of an establishment they might not get the chance to visit in the flesh.
It's not a new phenomenon, but it's gained traction in recent years. People are after more memorable experiences, leading to more elaborate bar programs, multi-bar takeovers and more immersive experiences. But there's a lot to consider when it comes to these collaborations.
Cheers to that
Let's start with the practical bit â who pays?
Hyacinthe LescoeĚt, co-founder of The Cambridge Public House in Paris (which recently traveled to London to take over Shoreditch cocktail bar Swift), will occasionally ask brands to cover the cost of takeover travel and accommodation. For the brands involved, it means placement on menus and in the drinks â a welcome opportunity for smaller independent drinks businesses to be mixed by some of the world's best bartenders.
There are some instances when the host bar will foot the bill and use the takeover to build on extras, like staff seminars, as when London's Homeboy â a bar that specializes in Irish whiskey cocktails â traveled to Washington DC for two nights at the Doyle Bar & Lounge. As well as delivering a seminar each day on their signature modern Irish hospitality, co-founders Aaron Wall and CiarĂĄn Smith left the Doyle bar team with a new martini program.
Shake it up
But be careful when you travel â don't leave your most profitable nights short-staffed, for example â but there are benefits to getting out there. Traveling the world allows bars to market their brand and showcase what they do on an international stage.
For Two Schmucks' Moe, takeovers are about delivering a full experience. When his team took over Lyaness on London's South Bank last year, he covered the windows, added neon signs and picked out a hip-hop playlist to give guests the feeling of being in his Barcelona âfive-star dive barâ.
âGoing thousands of miles to just stand behind a bar and do your drinks? Think about how that sounds,â he says. âIf you're going to do it, commit to it and go into it with a clear idea of what you want to do â the music, the atmosphere. Ask to see photos of the bar. Just doing 10% more can make your event 100% better.â
For more on the business of bar takeovers, check out the full story here.
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Inspiration for the home, plus things to eat, drink and wear.
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Making over the medicine cabinet
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Here are four brands making everyday ailments a lot easier to treat â and they look good doing it.
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ITCHY, a skincare company based in Sweden (where the brand claims dry skin is more common than anywhere else on Earth), offers an unscented body cream and dietary supplements to keep skin healthy and hydrated. |
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Nobody wants sweat marks or unseemly white streaks. Deodorant brand Duradry has a three-step system for excessive sweating that's both preventative and cleansing. |
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Gone are the days of chalky antacid tablets. Wild Dose offers an all-natural bloating-relief tablet, with probiotics and digestive enzymes in groovy lavender packaging. |
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Natural supplements brand Uqora is making the experience of having a urinary tract infection slightly less unpleasant with its Target sachets, which are dissolvable in water and help flush out the tract. |
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BRAND PARTNER: Atelier100
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Open call for makers and creatives!
Swedish powerhouses H&M and Ingka Group, the largest IKEA franchise, are unifying their resources to offer a new design incubator, mentoring program and highly visible London marketplace â Atelier100. Why? To enable creator independence and give customers access to the local sustainable products they love. Sound right for you?
Learn more and apply today.
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Tips and tools to become better at life and work.
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Three founders on⌠AI copywriting tools
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Artificial intelligence (AI) copywriting tools have taken a big step up in the past few years (they've even written an op-ed). The format is simple: input some ideas, select the kind of copy you want to produce (eg, blog or Instagram caption) and the tone (eg, witty or friendly). Then, the algorithm will spit out ideas to rid you of writer's block. But is a robot really an adequate replacement? Three business owners told us about their experiences with AI copywriting tools.
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Zac Ellis, co-founder of supplement brand No Ordinary Moments.
âWe use CopyAI for some of our writing. We mainly use AI writing tools to help give us inspiration. The angles that the copywriting tools take can be very different from what a person would typically write about. So, we'll often plug in something we've written â like a product description, advert or blog â and see if we can improve our writing based on what we get out of CopyAI.â
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Eddie Shleyner, founder of marketing newsletter VeryGoodCopy.
âAI copywriting tools are great at generating old, disparate things; human copywriters are great at figuring out how to put those things together â at least they should be. CopyAI, Jasper, Copysmith, Writesonic, Headlime - I've experimented with all of them. They're a good way to start your project, to brainstorm and get some ideas and build some momentum. But AI copywriting tools are just that: tools. When used to complement a writer's process, they contribute to better, more compelling work. That said, when used without human direction - without the benefit of context and nuance - though the work may look polished and tidy, it's just randomness.â
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Felicity Wild, founder of brand messaging studio Tone of Voice Nerd.
âHonestly? The ones I've tried have produced only recycled, formulaic copy we've all seen a hundred times before. It's all very mediocre. The outputs lack empathy and creativity. Truly great copy makes an emotional connection â it's funny, it's sad, it's unexpected, it resonates with the reader. The suggested copy from the AI tools I've tried has had none of this. It's flat, lifeless and generic. Perhaps, one positive is that their existence brings attention to copywriting as an important aspect of branding and marketing.â
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Other great stuff we loved this week.
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