Recently my design friend Carli and I embarked upon a large side project together – making a lemonade stand for Restaurant Day, an event where anybody can make a pop-up restaurant for a day.
We hand-mixed three exotic flavors, created a booth with bunting and handmade signage, and even made a promotional video for our endeavor. Click here see recipes and photos from our lemonade stand adventure.
Recently my design friend Carli and I embarked upon a large side project together – making a lemonade stand for Restaurant Day, an event where anybody can make a pop-up restaurant for a day.
We hand-mixed three exotic flavors, created a booth with bunting and handmade signage, and even made a promotional video for our endeavor. Click here see recipes and photos from our lemonade stand adventure.
Four times a year Restaurant Day occurs around the world, where anybody can create a pop-up restaurant for a day. In Copenhagen usually 30 or so teams participate, resulting in a plethora of interesting food options for the day which you can find via a handy app.
In March of 2013, my Australian design friend Carli, her husband Wouter and I toured the booths of Restaurant Day Copenhagen. We drank koldskål on Queen Louises Bridge, tried champagne sorbet in a Nørrebro courtyard, and had a 3-course meal on the street near St. Hans Square accompanied by a Cuban band.
We had a fantastic time and vowed to participate with our own booth at the next Restaurant Day. Our contribution would be…A LEMONADE STAND.
Like any over-eager adult purveyors of handcrafted lemonade, we made a short video promoting our Lemonade Stand. If you’ve ever wondered how lemonade was made, this video reveals all. Thanks to the team at Jip Jip for animation and Matthew Matthew for the music clip.
Carli and I perfected our homemade lemonade syrups to taste just so. We even employed the help of a small team of taste testers from Holland (Wouter & Family) to give us feedback on our initial recipes.
Each flavor was sold for 20kr (about $3.50) with an special upgrade to a “Grandpa’s Lemonade” (hint: add gin) for 40kr. We also shared the recipes with visitors so they could make their own homemade lemonade.
Lemon & Lavender
– in a saucepan: 1 part sugar + 1 part water + 1 tablespoon lavender
– simmer 5 mins and then cool
– juice 2 lemons
– drain lavender bits out, add lemon to make syrup
– mix syrup (approx a shot glass, or to taste) with a cup of bubbly water, lemon slice and ice
Cucumber & Mint
– two cucumbers: peel + chop + blend
– drain juice
– in a saucepan: 1 part sugar + 1 part water + bunch of mint
– simmer 5 min. remove mint. cool. add cucumber juice to make syrup.
– mix syrup (approx a shot glass, or to taste) with a cup of bubbly water, lemon slice and ice (garnish with mint)
Strawberry & Basil
– in a saucepan: 1 part sugar + 1 part water + bunch of basil
– simmer 5 mins and then cool
– blend 100 grams strawberries with some fresh basil
– mix liquid with strawberries to make syrup
– mix syrup (approx a shot glass, or to taste) with a cup of bubbly water, lemon slice and ice (garnish with basic and strawberry slice)
Of course we made a Facebook event to attract customers and posted vigorously about our preparations and product offerings. At one point, an attendee commented “I get the point, I’m COMING to your Lemonade Stand!”. YAY!
We were as excited as two kids on the first day of school, and the day of reckoning was drawing nearer.
Carli and I spent hours hand painting directional lemon signage and making Pantone perfect bunting to decorate our tent. We had everything planned to a T…except the weather. Be warned future lemonade stand entrepreneurs! If there is anything that will foil your plans on a successful business model it will be BAD WEATHER.
On the day of the big event it was windy and rainy and not at all conducive to selling lemonade. A follow up project to this one could be writing the guide “How to Sell Lemonade in Inclement Weather” with the following chapter outline:
1. Don’t
2. Weather to Attendance Ratios
3. Upping Sales with Alcohol Add-Ons
4. Wind Resistant Tent Solutions
5. Frostbite Avoidance & Ice Cube Handling
6. What to do when Drunk People Request Freebies, and When Denied, Pee in the Bushes Nearby
7. If You Survive
But, our main goal was to have fun, which we accomplished in spades. We surprised customers with our unorthodox lemonade flavors, we visited with the local Jehovah Witnesses who took shelter from the rain under our stand, and we had enough leftovers to give private lemonade tastings to friends, family and co-workers.
Next up: Restaurant Day Fall 2013 (if I can convince Carli to repeat the madness…)
There is a giant plastic bag culture in Denmark stemming from people recycling what they consider the “expensive expenditure” of buying supermarket bags. Bags are used again and again, not only for groceries but to freight clothes and other items from A to B, to cover bicycle seats from the elements, and even as poor-man’s galoshes on a rainy day. I’ve seen a grown and respectable business man arrive to the office with a Netto bag on one foot, and a Rema 1000 bag on the other. His fine leather shoes were spic and span – no shame in bagging your feet.
These bags, and their graphic designs, are ubiquitous, so I thought I would try and distill the various supermarket logos into their simplest but still recognizable form. Can you guess all eight?
Let me tell you a story. A story of magic and chance and hope and five friendly girls who one afternoon chose to spend a few hours writing messages in a bottle.
Magic. Last year, a girl wrote a message in a bottle. It was a love letter, she was searching, and it was found. A man in a kayak was out enjoying the fjord when he spied her bottle, a surprise from his usual solitary trips at sea. Unfortunately, he was already spoken for – a married man who could not accept the questions posed in her message. But he wanted to help this girl and promised to send the bottle on its way again the next time he was out on the open waters.
Months went by. The girl forgot about her message in a bottle. One day she received an email from a Danish boy who was wind surfing in Tenerife. He too had found the bottle out on the open water. At first thinking it was a joke, he took a picture of it and asked “are you real?”. A letter written by a Danish girl found by a Danish boy so many miles from home seemed like a stretch. But there was nothing false about it, so they started to write back and forth.
Chance. The boy and girl met, even though he was living in Barcelona and she in Copenhagen. But while the circumstances were exciting, the pressure of fate was too much and reality unfolded in a more mundane way than Hollywood might have written. They lived so far away, they were unsure, they decided to abstain from pursuing further communication after their first meeting. Let down, both returned to their everyday lives.
Hope. Not to be discouraged, she returned the next year with the same group of girls to drink another bottle of wine, pour words onto a page and throw it into the big blue sea. Perhaps the message in a bottle itself won’t find what she is looking for. But the process and the action held significance, and being clear in what you seek is often the first step in finding it.
The flaskepostdating event was organized by Ditte and Lotte, who were inspired to write messages in a bottle after they found one on a beach in Denmark and wondered – what if this message had come from somebody important, meant just for them? Read more about the history and use of messages in a bottle on Wikipedia. The story about the girl and the boy was recounted as one of many past success stories that stemmed from a flaskepostdating event. See you there this coming summer?
At times things feel like a test. A good test, an unknown test, a test that will explain something later, a test that will reveal surprising results, a test that is just plain fun. Due to a genetic splicing experiment between two people, my parents, I am equal parts implementor of MAKING THINGS WORK and EXPERIMENTS. Sometimes the functional part comes first, but I find when the experiment part comes first it leads to a function I never would have imagined. For example, a new way to cook an egg.
Walking around Nørrebro in Copenhagen there are many Asian shops, all of which boast a brigade of little waving cat figurines – also known as Maneki-neko. They seem so omnipresent that I suspect they are part of a Secret Danish Surveillance System – one that makes sure you only cross the street on green and pay your taxes promptly.
These felines are the exact opposite of everything “Danish Design” is reported to be, and if I had to name a Danish counterpart to a Maneki-neko it would be Kay Bojesen’s teak monkey (nearly every Danish home has one).
I like unlikely pairings – or perhaps my subconscious does – because one day as I walked past yet another window full of friendly cats, I pictured them painted with the Royal Copenhagen pattern, the quintessential floral design used on the most famous of Danish porcelain. And my brain doesn’t stop once it has had such an idea, so I had to make it real.
Continue reading “Royal Copenhagen Cat”
Update June 4, 2012: The next steps for the Goodie Monster are to find a home in a Portland area school, to make an impact at a local level directly with kids by providing a framework for eating healthily. Check out the Goodie Monster on Facebook, or contact Mark Jacobs for more information at mark@goodiemonster.com.
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As part of our efforts to raise money to create more Goodie Monsters, we are offering rewards for people who back the effort. This reward is a 3″ custom designed miniature replica of the Goodie Monster with moveable arms, produced by Crazy Label. To get 1 of 100 toys produced and support the project, check out the campaign on Kickstarter.
