The Ordinary Immersive Experience

When The Ordinary puts on an immersive pop-up in Shoreditch and asks you to run the café, you show up ready. The event ran across four days, and with 4,000 visitors, a custom bar unit built for the space and sleek branded cups to match, our job was to make sure the coffee lived up to everything around it.

Home Case Studies The Ordinary’s immersive Shoreditch pop-up

THE REQUIREMENT

The brief came through Studio XAG, the creative agency behind the event. The Ordinary’s Immersive Experience was built around the launch of the brand’s new Rice Lipids + Ectoin Microemulsion moisturiser. It ran at UNLOCKED Shoreditch and was open to the public across four days, with a separate session for retailers and TikTok Shop partners. Around 4,000 visitors were expected in total.

Our role was to run The Ordinary Café – a dedicated coffee space within the pop-up. The client provided a custom bar unit built to match the space, clad in white metro tiles and finished with their signage. We worked with them ahead of the event to produce branded cups printed with The Ordinary’s logo and the line: “Skincare shouldn’t be a luxury. Neither should Coffee.” Two of our baristas ran the service throughout, serving our own Northern Espresso blend – roasted in our micro-roaster specifically for each event.

ON THE GROUND

As events go, this one had everything. Alongside the café, there was a DJ set, a launch party, lab-inspired interactive spaces, educational workshops and a steady flow of curious visitors coming through all day. It’s exactly the kind of high-energy, buzzy environment we love working in, but it did mean staying on our toes.

The launch party on the first evening took place in the same space as our coffee bar, so once daytime service wrapped, we packed everything down to hand the space over. The client had organised storage for us on-site, which made things straightforward, and we were back up and ready for 10am the next morning.

The Ordinary also opened the event to the public a little earlier than originally planned. We were well stocked and ready, so service carried on without issues.

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Danielle Wilson, Studio XAG (for The Ordinary)

"The team were absolutely INCREDIBLE on site; I really can't shout loud enough about how fantastic both Hollie and Miriam were. They were proactive, reactive, super personable throughout a very busy few days – please pass on my enormous thanks to them."

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drinks served

Hollie and Miriam were on site for all four days, serving 1,414 drinks in total. Oat milk was the clear favourite, which is exactly what we’d expect from a wellness-conscious crowd, and hot chocolates kept the non-coffee drinkers happy throughout. With a well-known brand drawing the crowd, getting the menu right for the audience mattered.

The Ordinary wanted a polished, high-quality service that felt like a natural part of the event, and that’s exactly what Hollie and Miriam delivered. It helped that the event itself was genuinely fun to be at. On breaks, we got to explore the pop-up, including the ball room and tornado ball grabber game – not a bad way to spend a shift!

Events like this one are a reminder of why we love what we do. A brand that people love, a beautifully put-together space and a brief that asked us to make the coffee feel like part of the experience.

If your next event deserves coffee that’s part of the story, get in touch – we’d love to be involved.