A Gen Z coffee-hacking activation built to teach the GCC a brand-new product, one drink at a time.
How It Started
Nescafé came to Mindspace with a product most people in the region had never seen before: Espresso Concentrate, a 500ml bottle of pure, full-bodied coffee that makes ten café-quality iced coffees and asks you to build each one yourself. The platform was already set in the brief, “Pour It, Mix It, Hack It,” with the job of hacking cold coffee out of a single shot, aimed squarely at Gen Z. What Mindspace was briefed to build was everything that happens on the ground: a premium booth for mass-engagement events, a mobile setup that could travel, the sampling mechanic, the merch, the giveaways, the whole experience. That on-ground world, along with the naming and the copy that hold it together, is the part I built.
The Thinking
The tricky thing about a concentrate is that nobody knows what it is until they’ve used it. Iced coffee is everywhere with Gen Z right now, but a bottle you measure and dilute and customise is a genuinely new ritual for this market, and you can’t sample your way past confusion. People had to understand the thing before they could fall for it.
So the activation had to do two jobs at once: teach the product and let people play with it. The answer was to turn the learning into the fun, to make hacking your coffee a hands-on ritual you walk through step by step rather than a sample handed to you across a table. Learn it first, then build your own.
The Coffee Hack Hub
The centrepiece is the Coffee Hack Hub, a 5×5 experiential café built as a journey rather than a booth. You don’t walk up to it, you walk through it.
It opens with custom touchscreen machines, because this is a market-first product and assuming everyone already gets it would be a mistake. Each screen offers two doors: Learn It, a thirty-second film on what Concentrate is and how to use it, and Try It, which takes you into the drink. From there you pick Classic Drinks, the lattes and frappes and macchiatos that ease you in, or Custom Drinks, a full build-your-own screen of syrups, tonics, milks and trendier add-ons. You choose, you get a ticket, and you’re off down the line.
From there it runs through four stations, each named to keep you inside the ritual. The Cup Station, where you grab a branded cup and write your name on it. The Mix Station, where a barista builds your selection from a wall of syrups, infusions, fresh fruit and dairy alternatives. The Hack Station, where you add your own dose of Concentrate from two giant dispensers shaped like the bottles themselves. And the Garnish Station, where you finish it with sauces, dustings, edible flowers, coffee jelly and flavoured boba. Then you photograph it, post it, tag Nescafé, and you’re in the draw.
Every part of it carries the same word. Concentrate, concentrated, the Hub, the hacks, all of it pulling in one direction, so the product name is the thing you can’t stop saying by the time you leave.
Beyond the Hub
A single space doesn’t reach a region, so the Hub is the anchor for a whole kit of extensions.
The Concentrate Creation Kit hands people the essentials to keep hacking at home: both flavours, a 50ml branded measuring cup, a mixing spoon and a metal straw, sold at the Hub for anyone who wants to take the ritual with them. The grand draw prize is a limited-edition cup from a Nescafé x BODUM collab, earned by snapping a drink and posting it.
To get the word out, there’s the Concentrated Influencer Kit, a small invitation into the Concentrate world with the bottles, branded ice-cube moulds, five syrups, a measuring cup and a clear glass, so the region’s creators can build their own drinks and bring their followers to the Hub for a meet-and-greet. I wrote the invitation copy that goes inside it, the friendly “what’s a good day without an ice-cold coffee or three” note that sets the tone for the whole thing.
Then it gets mobile. The Coffee Hub Express is a Vespa-led trailer with a small sampling bar and a projector, rolling up to office complexes and open-air spots by day and high-footfall hangouts by night, where it screens short Concentrate films off a portable screen. And Brunch Hacks takes over brunch venues with a compact Espresso Concentrate mixer bar, running everything from Americanos to a small world of coffee cocktails for a crowd that still loves a good brunch. Branded aprons and promoter uniforms keep the whole crew on-world, and the deck maps it across the obvious Gen Z spots in Dubai, Kuwait and Qatar.
What I Did
The concept and the experiential architecture, all the naming, the tone of voice and the copy, including that influencer invitation, and the activation mechanics across the Hub and every extension. The “Pour It, Mix It, Hack It” platform came in the client brief; my job was the world built on top of it. The Mindspace art and 3D team handled the design and the renders.
Why This Work Matters to Me
Most sampling activations assume the product sells itself and the job is just handing it out. This one couldn’t, because you can’t hand someone a concentrate and expect them to know what to do with it, so the writing had to teach without ever feeling like a lesson. Turning the instruction manual into a walk-through ritual, naming every step so it reads as play rather than education, that’s the part I’m proud of.
It also taught me how much a single word can do when you commit to it fully. Concentrate, concentrated, every station and kit and trailer bending back to the same idea, until the name starts doing the positioning for you. The Hub never made it out of pitch, as far as I know, but the discipline behind it, building one coherent world that teaches a brand-new product through nothing but play, is exactly the kind of brief I’d take again tomorrow.
Project: Nescafé Espresso Concentrate, The Coffee Hack Hub
Role: Concept, Naming, Copy, Activation Design
Year: 2025
Agency: Mindspace
Client: Nescafé (Nestlé)
Status: Pitch