IRL: Instagram for Coffee
Check out the café where you can pay by posting…
This weekend, Instagrammers can get their caffeine fix simply by posting. The Apartment is hosting a two-day pop-up in Soho, featuring a café that uses Instagram as its currency. Caffeine lovers can pay for coffee and snacks by uploading an Instagram post featuring the relevant social handles, and sharing it to Twitter. Each day customers’ balances are cleared, so they can head back for more the following day.
The Apartment General Store – a.k.a. @tagslondon – is the brainchild of Abi Marvel, the one-woman wonder behind creative agency, The Apartment. She’s worked with bloggers and brands for over four years, leveraging the power of social influence to engineer powerful partnerships, on and offline.
In previous years, brands have dabbled with social currency to press-worthy effect. In 2014, Marc Jacobs launched a pop-up Tweet Shop in New York to promote the Daisy fragrance, giving shoppers products in return for tweets, Instagram photos and Facebook posts. Last year, American brand OnePiece launched an ambassador system known as ‘PieceKeeper’, enabling them to calculate customers’ followings across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Vine, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn. For every 500 followers, ambassadors received £1 to spend at the label’s store in London’s Boxpark.
By juxtaposing the social currency-fuelled café alongside a shop, The Apartment is enticing foot traffic, while generating social buzz for their partnered brands – a savvy social move that will likely inspire others to embrace this new, powerful form of currency.
The Apartment General Store & Cafe Pop-Up is open from 24th to 25th September at The Apartment, 01 Hopkins Street, W1F 0HS
Words by Natalie Hughes