KATE THOMPSON DAVY

A freelancer working in a coffee shop, writing about freelancers who work in coffee shops. Life really does imitate art!

I recently wrote an article about the “coffice” trend for the FM Life section of the Financial Mail (South Africa). Here is a short extract:

SA — especially Cape Town and Johannesburg — has embraced the coffee culture so prevalent in the world’s developed economies and major international cities. Today’s professional stereotype involves clutching a disposable coffee cup in one hand and a mobile in the other. It’s not a big leap from that to the other trend taking off locally: settling in for a few hours’ work at your local coffice — a contraction of coffee shop and office. Chris Brown is a co-owner (together with his brother Andrew Brown) of corporate onsite coffee vendor The Daily Buzz and owner of Craft Coffee, a specialist roasting company. He has recently opened the Craft Coffee Café in Newtown, Johannesburg, both to serve coffee to the local business crowd and to showcase the roasting work they do. 

Brown argues that though some chain businesses that have been around for decades claim there has always been a coffee culture locally, their business model was really about getting people in for the food, “as opposed to your fast speciality coffee shop where you can grab and go, and get back to work, where the focus is specifically on the coffee”. “Though it certainly isn’t the leader in terms of quality anymore, Starbucks is the one that popularised the speciality coffee concept. A lot of [the increase in local coffee culture] is from seeing Starbucks on TV and the movies, and from people who have lived or travelled overseas,” says Brown. 

“It definitely has become a more trendy thing, to sit in a coffee shop. The spaces that are opening up all over the place are more inviting — where you can come and sit on a couch, not just a square table with four chairs. Or you can sit up on a stool at a bar and plug your laptop in and no-one thinks you’re funny because you are sitting there on your own.”

Read the full article: http://www.financialmail.co.za/life/2015/02/05/workspace-coffice-workers