Starbucks has opened a big store in the old foreign house in Shanghai. can you feel high-end?

Generally speaking, Starbucks takes more than two months from location to opening, but Sinan Mansion takes more than three months. On the opening day, senior Chinese design director Jiang Bolin (John Boline), Chinese conceptual design director Shen Chuanxiang and Ye Guanling, who actually designed the store, were summoned to the scene for media interviews.

For the average consumer, this is just a bigger Starbucks. But inside Starbucks, they classify it as one of the 54 Starbucks Reserve stores in the country. You can think of it as the high-end line of Starbucks, but there is no obvious sign in the store to show this. In fact, apart from the only Starbucks Logo on the exterior wall, the store can hardly see its iconic green, replaced by black, brown and brown, which are common in industrial design.

The biggest difference should be "Coffee Lab" on the second floor. The "coffee lab" is actually a long open marble bar with a Black Hawk coffee maker, two siphon brewers and two hand-brewed coffee filters, while four MOF-branded cakes are sold in the dessert freezer for Sinan Mansion. The counter opposite the bar is artistically displayed with selected stores for black mugs and coffee beans, as well as Japanese brand HARIO bean grinders, hand pots, Yunduo cups and so on, somewhat like those in the coffee industry.

There are two black hawks in Sinan mansion. Another three-headed Black Hawk VA388 Coffee Machine (Victoria Arduino Black Eagle VA388), located at the cashier counter on the first floor, is the WBC World Barista Competition machine from 2015 to 2017, which was previously available only in two stores in Chengdu-one of which is next to the Reggie Hotel where CEO Howard Schultz is staying in Chengdu.

In the case of the same staffing, the cup rate of the Black Hawk is significantly lower than usual. In most stores, clerks only need to pour coffee beans into a fully automatic machine ThermoPlan to make drinks. Black Hawk requires grinding, loading, pressing, extraction and removal of residue, and if it is a milk coffee, the barista also needs to manually adjust the temperature of the heated milk.

In addition to the upgrading of the environment, the most important feature of Zhenxuan store is that it will display individual coffee beans from a certain manor, each of which will be clearly marked with flavor. In January 2016, it also put 250 grams of "Jamaican Valenderford Blue Mountain Coffee" on shelves at some Zhenxuan stores for 388 yuan-although "Blue Mountain" is already an abused word, it is indeed the most advanced category of coffee beans.

The more complicated operation procedure not only determines the quality of coffee, but also has a sense of ritual. This can also explain why the seven or eight employees of Sinan Mansion are all "black aprons". They usually study for more than six months and pass the examination, and are called "coffee masters" inside Starbucks.

"Coffee is changing rapidly in China. Four or five years ago, few people knew how to drink coffee in this way. People's habits of using milk and sugar have also changed a lot. " Jiang Bolin told Curiosity Daily. At the same time, he believes that Chinese people are particularly social. "sometimes four or five friends and family will come out together and need to find a space." At this time, their environment is very important, so we will also choose some more comfortable, larger sofa chairs. "

Exquisite, low-key stores are one of the most useful ways to curry favor with a market, which has been demonstrated by several international chains. Uniqlo and MUJI are common consumer goods in Japan, but in China, huge flagship stores have laid the foundation for consumer trust. At this point, Zara has always been an impartial executor of premium store strategy: Zara stores around the world maintain a high standard of decoration and window furnishings, and the location is close to luxury brands.