During a 10-day span this September, Coconut Cult executed a large-scale, broad-reaching “experiment” in brand collaboration. We sat down with co-founder and chief visionary officer Noah Simon-Waddell to learn all about it.
The CPG-centric project managed to reel in over 10,000 attendees and somewhere in the realm of 5,000 social media posts for a visit to a “fun, organic carnival”-like pop-up store featuring 48 food and beverage brands, Simon-Waddell said. Dubbed the Collab Lab, the event took place in New York City September 11-21.
“It was an ambitious amount of brands that we tried to collaborate with and that was the idea,” said Simon-Waddell. “So much about food and feeding people is a collaborative energy [so] there were different brands with different scopes and sizes of collaboration. I love having opportunities to be able to work with other brands, chefs and food makers that align with my food values.”
The idea spawned from a combination of two experiences Simon-Waddell had in the past year. First, he noticed a slew of CPG brands hosting pop-up experiences in New York during the month of September, and, second, he stumbled upon an exhibit by Lucy Sparrow at Art Basel in Miami. Sparrow is known for making food-centric felt-fabric creations, leading Simon-Waddell to pitch her on the initial idea.
“It would be so cool if you could do a felt Erewhon healthy grocery store [installation],” he said to her. “So many of those brands are trending and people get excited when they see the packaging. They have an emotional attachment to so many of these brands. She was into the idea, which I almost wasn’t expecting.”
After that, Simon-Waddell began reaching out to the other food and beverage founders that he connected with most often, and from there, the collaboration ideas began to roll in. According to Simon-Waddell, about 90% of the concepts that eventually became their own pop-ups within the Collab Lab were ideated during open creative discussions with potential partners.
“I understood that for the felt marketplace to really look like a small grocery store, that I needed brands from a lot of different food categories…. to make it really feel like you’re really in a grocery store.”
Walking into The Collab Lab, attendees first were greeted by the Collab bar where they could create their own Coconut Cult yogurt flavor with ingredients from participating brands – everything from RIND, Hu and Simple Mills to Cleveland Kitchen and Graza. Next, they were ushered into the larger space where the remaining activations were housed including Olipop’s dirty soda bar, MALKshakes, fish taco night with Fishwife and Honey Mama’s chocolate ice cream sandwiches.
That room also featured the felt marketplace, a claw machine, pop-a-shot games and “giant toilets to take photos with,” he detailed. In between the whimsy, there were also speaking engagements – with the team at Mid-Day Squares sitting down one evening with a handful of influencers to talk TikTok.
The idea was to “make it fun” while also conducting a “big experiment,” on the value of in-person events for the vegan yogurt brand, Simon-Waddell explained. While Coconut Cult frequently collaborates with other CPG brands on limited-edition flavors, this was the first time it has executed a collaboration at this scale with so many participants and moving parts.
“Industry standard is like getting a deck that explains exactly what you’re getting into. Here’s exactly what we’re doing. During this entire process we really barely had any idea [what it was] – it was all so iterative and constantly changing, like ‘hold on, We actually have a better idea. Scratch the last thing we sold you on – can we pivot?’ I’m thankful that we got so many different brands to be game for participating in this big experiment.”
That also enabled the brand to attract new audiences and establish a deeper connection with its loyal fanbase. A “moment in time” survey conducted by the team at Honey Mama’s found that nearly three-quarters of the individuals in the line at one time had come specifically for Coconut Cult; the remaining quarter had come for some other definitive reason: “another brand, the dirty soda bar, something else,” Simon-Waddell said.
“There was such a diverse group in there from kids to seniors – just a true New York smorgasbord of literally every single person. That was good to see because yogurt is traditionally more of a female audience. It was really cool to see almost as many guys as girls coming into this pop up.”
