Ralph Lauren opens Ralph's Coffee on Fifth Avenue

A second floor café on Fifth Avenue

In September 2014, Ralph Lauren opened Ralph's Coffee on the second floor of the new Polo Ralph Lauren flagship at 711 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of 55th Street in New York.^{1, 2, 3} The café occupied a corner of the men's store that had been designed from the outset to carry hospitality rather than merchandise. It was the brand's first coffee shop and the formal beginning of a coffee programme that has since extended to more than 40 locations across North America, Europe and Asia.^{1, 4}

The room read as a calibrated extract of the Ralph Lauren retail dictionary. White subway tiled floors and white bead board walls set a clean ground.⁵ Eighteen foot oak columns anchored the volume.⁵ Marble top tables and antique bistro chairs filled the floor.⁵ A custom green wordmark, drawn in a hand cut sans serif and set inside a circular badge, ran across the takeaway cups, the napkins and the signage. The room asked to be photographed and was, repeatedly, in the months that followed.

A pop up that earned a permanent address

The brand had tested the idea earlier the same year with a Ralph's Coffee Truck that travelled around Manhattan. The truck served the same blends in the same packaging and produced the same response in the same press outlets. By the time the second floor café opened, the visual identity, the menu architecture and the operational model were already documented. The flagship build out was the upgrade of a working prototype rather than the launch of a new concept.

The Polo Bar, a sit down restaurant in the lower level of the same building, followed in January 2015.^{1, 6} Together, Ralph's Coffee and The Polo Bar turned 711 Fifth Avenue into a hospitality address as much as a retail address. The architecture of the project, with food, beverage and merchandise stacked on adjacent floors of a single building, anticipated the integrated lifestyle floors that other luxury houses opened in Tokyo, Paris and London later in the decade.

The product programme

The coffee programme was built with La Colombe, the Philadelphia roaster founded in 1994 by Todd Carmichael and Jean Philippe Iberti.^{5, 7} Beans came from USDA certified organic farms in Africa, Mexico, Central America and South America.⁸ Three core blends anchored the menu: Ralph's Roast, a balanced everyday cup; a decaffeinated version of the same; and an espresso blend built for the bar.⁴ The packaging used a matte cream sleeve with the green wordmark and the badge, and was designed to read on a kitchen counter rather than in a coffee aisle.

Ralph Lauren himself framed the programme in a published statement that has since travelled across all subsequent café openings.

"The smell of freshly brewed coffee evokes so many memories for me, mostly of time spent with friends and family, the people I love. I wanted to develop these coffee blends in that spirit, and create a place where people could come together and take a break from their busy days."^{4, 5}

The statement set the editorial frame for every later location. Ralph's Coffee was not positioned as a luxury extension or as a competitor to the third wave specialty cafés that dominated the New York scene in 2014. It was positioned as a hospitality gesture rendered in the brand's own visual code.

Why a coffee shop, and why now

By 2014, Ralph Lauren Corporation had been listed on the New York Stock Exchange for 17 years and had built a portfolio that ran from Purple Label tailoring to Double RL workwear, from Polo Ralph Lauren home to children's licensing.^{1, 7} The brand's expansion problem at that stage was not assortment. It was atmosphere. Retail visits had moved partially online and competing American houses had begun to invest in restaurants, members' lounges and hospitality venues as ways to keep the in person brand encounter productive.

Ralph's Coffee answered that problem with the smallest possible vehicle. A cup of coffee was a portable carrier of brand atmosphere. The cup, the wordmark, the napkin and the takeaway bag travelled to the office, to the park bench, to the social feed of the customer. Each carrying surface continued the brand's visual code outside the store at a per impression cost lower than any other format the company operated. The product was almost incidental to the design of the asset.

The platform that the verse anchors

The Fifth Avenue flagship that housed the first Ralph's Coffee closed in early 2017 under wider Ralph Lauren Corporation restructuring, but the coffee programme outlived the store.⁹ New locations opened on Madison Avenue, in Mayfair London, in Roppongi Tokyo, in Hong Kong, in Paris, in Milan, in Boston Seaport and in Tysons Galleria.^{4, 9} Trucks and trikes appeared at sailing regattas, polo tournaments and seasonal pop ups in Manhattan, the Hamptons and Aspen. The format remained constant: the same wordmark, the same blends, the same green packaging, the same hospitality script.

Read this way, Ralph's Coffee belongs in the same category as the Hermès silk square or the Tiffany blue box, a small object designed to carry the brand's full atmosphere on a single surface. The 711 Fifth Avenue opening in September 2014 was the moment when Ralph Lauren formalised that asset into a permanent operation, and turned a temporary marketing instrument into a category that the brand now runs in three continents.¹