25th February 2019

A Glimpse of the future

This week in east London there’s a small newsagent hiding a big secret. On first glance it’s an unassuming corner shop right down to the strip lights overhead and stacks of soup cans and snacks. But perusing the shelves filled with chocolates, a gleaming brass button reads ‘Discover the story behind the bar’. Press it and the whole wall revolves to reveal Rosine’s Hot Chocolate Salon, a 12-person pop-up cafe where visitors can sip the most delicious Fairtrade cocoa drinks while learning about the inspiring West African female farmers behind the beans – like Rosine.

Open from 25 February to 3 March at 66 Kingsland Road, the speakeasy-style salon is a project from the newest addition to the Zetteler family, Glimpse. Glimpse is a creative collective that dreams up and produces magical, feel-good activations that widen the reach of vitally important social or environmental campaigns. What makes Glimpse quite different to your standard agency (and one of the many reasons we’re so psyched about working together) is that it works as an open community where anyone with creative skills can get involved. There are around 1600 people in the collective who come together for hack days to use their professional skills and thinking to come up with big ideas to change the world for the better. Glimpse also works with companies to help them rediscover their purpose and make more socially and environmentally responsible choices – helping businesses to be better and do better.

Rosine's Hot Chocolate Salon

Back at Rosine’s, the secret cafe will serve up the message of Fairtrade’s She Deserves campaign alongside three specially designed drinks, each named after a different female cocoa producer. The campaign aims to secure a living wage for female cocoa growers in West Africa and empower them to become business owners and leaders. Following the collapse in cocoa prices, farmers earn around 73p a day in Côte d’Ivoire, while the Fairtrade Foundation estimates that they need around twice that to live comfortably – £1.86, the price of a hot chocolate at Rosine’s.

‘She Deserves goes beyond the idea of charity and victimhood, it’s about fairness and justice,’ Glimpse founder James Turner tells us when we catch up with him ahead of the opening of Rosine’s. ‘If you work really hard and run a small business then you deserve to get paid enough to send your children to school and put food on the table.’ Glimpse embedded information about the campaign and interviews with the farmers alongside details of the delicious drinks on the menu at Rosine’s– The Rosine (a maple syrup-infused, whipped cream-topped cocoa devised by food writer Melissa Hensley), The Leocadie (chef Tess Ward’s vegan, salted recipe) and The Génévieve (a coconut milk, honey and baobab concoction laden with marshmallows, designed by eco chef Tom Hunt). The result is a fun, feel good entry point to a serious issue, where people come away feeling empowered to make positive changes.

West African cocoa bean farmer Rosine Bekoin

Coming up with brilliant, original ideas for charities and world-changers has been at the heart of Glimpse’s purpose since it was founded by former Greenpeace communications director James Turner and creative director Zac Schwarz in 2016. While working on Greenpeace’s Save the Arctic campaign, which fought to keep oil companies out of the melting arctic, James amassed a squad of filmmakers, photographers, designers and advertising creatives, all eager to use their skills to sell world-changing ideas rather than ‘What that [campaign] told me was that there was a huge desire among this community of people that wasn't being met, or at least often enough, in their current work,’ James explains.

Starting out as a Saturday morning meet-up of like-minded creatives, the initial Glimpse brief was to imagine a world free from consumerism, where our friends and relationships are more valuable than the stuff we can buy in shops. ‘That’s not often the message you get from culture generally,’ says James. ‘You’re told that the source of your identity and your self-worth comes from your spending power and the kind of handbag or trainers that you own.’ Out of the session came the idea to replace adverts across London with something radically different which brought people happiness rather than making them feel inadequate.

James explains, ‘We knew we had to raise the money on the internet, and what's the one thing that the internet would like us to see us replace adverts with? The answer is pretty simple: cats.’ Somewhere between an art piece and a guerrilla action, CATS raised £25,000 in just a few weeks and replaced 69 adverts around Clapham Common with pictures of cute felines as well as supporting cat charities in London. ‘There was something quite subversive in jacking the system,’ James laughs.

Glimpse’s campaign to imagine a world free from consumerism: Citizens Advertising Takeover Service (CATS)

The phenomenal success of this initial exercise in ‘culture-jamming’, as James likes to call it, confirmed to Glimpse they were on to something. In late summer 2017 James and Zac left their jobs to focus full-time on Glimpse, harnessing their creative network to make tackling some of the world’s injustices feel positive, uplifting and aspirational. With the refugee crisis constantly on their minds and Black Friday on the horizon, Glimpse wanted to create something that challenged people’s feelings about shopping while supporting the people fleeing war and persecution.

The result – Choose Love – was a pop-up shop in Soho where shelves were stacked with items much-needed by refugees, from physical items like blankets and clothes to health checks and safe spaces for women. Customers left the store empty-handed, but knew that their purchase had made the life of someone going through hardship just that little bit easier. ‘It was born out of the idea that we all enjoy the festivity of Christmas, going into town to pick out gifts – there’s nothing wrong with being generous,’ says James. ‘The problem is we've got stuck in this cycle where we feel like we have to buy gifts for everyone we know when actually most of us have everything we need.’

Choose Love store

Choose Love wasn’t just a shop, it was a movement. Working with Help Refugees, its initial informal target was to raise £60,000, but in its first year it drummed up a whopping £750,000 for the charity, with 10,000 customers passing through the doors. ‘Ten thousand people learnt about what it's like to bring up a baby in a refugee camp, for example,’ James says of the impact Choose Love had beyond just raising cash. ‘People would pick up a pack of nappies and think, yeah, I would actually have to deal with dirty nappies in a refugee camp. It’s a whole new way of thinking about the situation that you don't get from news reports. There was something unexpectedly powerful about using the language of retail to tell a story of human suffering, but also human hope and endeavour – people make incredible journeys and go through incredible hardships to escape war and persecution.’ A hack day with the wider Glimpse network delivered the idea of ‘Buy the store’, where you could pick up the entire shop for £500. That idea alone helped raise tens of thousands of pounds and in 2018 Choose Love opened a second store in New York and raised just shy of £2m for Help Refugees.

‘There are lots of issues in the world like the refugee crisis but we need more ways to think about them, more ways in and often more ways to help,’ adds James. ‘People feel overwhelmed, they think that these big global problems can often feel too big for them to pay a part in, and it's our job to find creative interesting ways for people to get a handle on it.’ We are over the moon to be supporting this groundbreaking collective on the next steps of its journey.

To find out more about She Deserves – the campaign behind Rosine’s Hot Chocolate Salon – visit Fairtrade’s website here.

She Deserves campaign, Fairtrade Fortnight 2019

Melissa Hemsley at Rosine's Hot Chocolate Salon