Trying to figure how you can augment your restaurant design amidst social distancing?
Get inspiration from a session from Design Partnership Worldwide at our virtual conference.
Design Partnership Worldwide founder Callie van Der Merwe is joining for QSR Media Sandhurst Conference & Awards for a session on restaurant design, geared to inform brands on approaches to consider during this period of social distancing.
Callie’s core focus is the intersection of creativity and commerce within the physical space. He has been featured in many publications, including Entrepreneur magazine, Australian Design Review, American Architectural Review and others.
Get to know him in this brief Q&A:
QSR Media: Could you tell us more about yourself, what you do, and how that falls into the multi-site restaurant industry?
Van Der Merwe: I am a Hospitality designer fascinated with Human Behaviour within the Physical Space [and] Design in order to connect people with product and place.
What are some of the industry issues you're thinking about at the moment? What are some developments you're seeing that the industry should take a closer look at?
I am naturally concerned with the developments of the last 2 months. This being said, it has only accelerated endemic structural issues of the category of the last 2 years. The success of restaurants has always been a delicate relationship between the space, the people and the products.
The Purveyor, Patron relationship has always been one of the cornerstones of successful establishments with the restaurateur being able to keep a finger on the pulse and do constant delicate adjustments in line with consumer needs. It has always been magic combination of those relationships that made for the total experience and ultimate success or failure.
To this end, I am very concerned with the arrival of third party delivery “partners”. Whilst a gift in appearance to the industry on the outside, it has in my view been in some cases a Trojan Horse. Disconnecting the end user from the supplier with very little to no shared data on behaviour, geography and spending patterns, means that the power has now shifted in the same manner that retailers lost power to Amazon.
What can we expect from your participation at the QSR Media Sandhurst Conference & Awards? What are some things you're excited to do there?
I would obviously like to touch on this issue above, but whilst this is something to be aware of there has naturally also been some other fundamental shifts in Consumer Behaviour that will dictate to restaurants what they can and cannot be in the post-COVID-19 space. Whilst a lot of this is perhaps guesswork, it is nevertheless interesting to have a look at historical similarities as well as fellow industry leader’s views on what this could potentially look like.
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