Barcelona
Anh is of Vietnamese origin and has spent her career in hospitality, crafting the small moments that make a place stay with you. Her own project: open a Vietnamese café in Barcelona that also sells plants, a place you come to for a coffee and stay in because it feels like home.
The challenge: Barcelona is not short of specialty coffee shops. To exist, the place had to be something other than one more café with nice plants, and that difference had to hold up on paper as much as in the experience.
Our mission with Anh: build the entire brand platform before opening. Vision, mission, values, audiences, offer, positioning, personality, tone of voice, promise, tagline and storytelling, so that Vietnamese culture would be the heart of the project rather than a backdrop.
We then took her all the way through her business plan, so that the brand promise and the business model would tell the same story. Structuring the core offer and the additional revenue streams (plant sales, workshops, private hire of the space), testing it against Barcelona’s specialty coffee market, and making concrete calls on what stayed on the menu and what had to go. A beautiful brand that does not add up never opens.
Naming was part of the project. It started out as Wild Palms. We proposed Lá, “leaf” in Vietnamese: shorter, more universal, easy to pronounce in any language, evoking nature without naming it. Together we finally landed on “Café Là”, which keeps the Vietnamese root while saying straight away what the place is.
Final positioning: the neighborhood’s cultural anchor, a Vietnamese café and a plant sanctuary where locals and visitors come to feel at home, discover something new and stay a little longer. Or, in one line: “Come for coffee, stay for belonging.”
