KAFO – the Ferrari of coffee and customer service

The story of how Bit Finer ended up creating KAFO’s new e-commerce website is quite random: Uwaga, Bit Finer’s partner agency, started to communicate with KAFO in terms of content marketing and was hired to write stories for their coffee blog. KAFO is the market leader in Estonia with 20+ years of background. One thing led to another and Bit Finer was invited to make a pitch for their new website. KAFO needed to get into e-commerce, and in a big way  – with totally different, bold, and unique experience.

Bit Finer and Uwaga got the chance, among many other design agencies, to send in their pitch and estimate. That they did, and it looks as though the pitch was so different from the others that they were chosen as the new design partner. It was a big win because they were competing against some of the big companies. 

A lot of research

As usual, Bit Finer did a lot of research before they started with the UX prototyping. Found out so many fascinating things and were impressed by their target groups known as user personas. KAFO’s team interview was of one of the most intense, lasting around 6 hours. Bit Finer interviewed 3 internal teams that all focused on different customer segments. 

They squeezed out as much data as they could and made a volume of notes, which they later analysed. Thanks to KAFO’s amazing corporate culture and all the nice people, gathering the information went quite easily. 

They got it all: data from KAFO, data from KAFO’s customers, data from web analytics, and much more. This enabled them to craft hundreds of targeted UX design mockups, which constituted the new website architecture. For the first time everybody understood what the new website would look like.

A slap in the face, well deserved

Once Bit Finer was done with the UX design, they started with the UI design  and to be honest they did not perform well on the first try. Bit Finer presented the initial idea of the new design and got a slap in the face, which was totally deserved.

Realising that the approach did not have that much of a WOW effect, they went back to the drawing board. Made the effort, forgot everything they had planned to do design-wise and came up with something as if there were no boundaries. That was exactly what was needed. Bit Finer got the style right and really felt that this time it was the one, they were gonna love it. And thankfully they did. That really kicked the team on and they completed the design with full confidence. 

Magical words

Bit Finer has to give a lot of credit to Mihkel Raud from Uwaga for the entertaining copywriting. It really gives the design life. But what can be said is that everything is totally different and the whole website is like a story. The tone is in your face, it is bold, it really speaks to you. Hidden treats all around make the website much more engaging.

Go offline, make an impact.

Customer experience can be good or it can be better than great. KAFO wanted to stand out from the crowd and decided that the surprise element would not be limited just to the kickass website. So Bit Finer was given an assignment to take care of the packaging too. Go offline, make an impact.

Nice box, logo, that’s it? No way! The packaging they made contained a series of messages to make the customer spread the word, to keep the box and feel more loyal to KAFO. The box they designed contains humorous badges like #coffeemaniac #tasteaddict #bloodtypecoffee, and on top of that they wrote 10 humorous coffee facts for true coffeeholics and included a personal letter from KAFO’s CEO. The letter is no ordinary one, it’s revealing and personal, it’s honest and in some ways it will be aneye-opener.

"Collaboration with guys from Uwaga and Bit Finer has been pure joy! KAFO’s new website did not turn out as another average project and you could really feel that the dedication level staying persistently at 110%. I believe they keep the level with all their projects. The past 6 months has been really enjoyable and the energy has always been positive. Can definitely say that KAFO has a reliable partner for the future in hand. " 
Feedback from KAFO 

Credits:

Revolutionary challenge - Team KAFO
Project management - Paul Post, Uwaga
Copywriter - Mihkel Raud, Uwaga
Lead UX/UI designer - Lauri Post
UX/UI designer - Mathias Vain
Development partner - Gotoandplay