Four Pillars Lab and the 10 000 Mile Collaboration
How Behind Bars is using technology to shrink the world.
You almost can’t get further apart than the Four Pillars Lab and Behind Bars. Sydney to Oslo. Look at it on the map. There are not too many cities that have a bigger distance between them. There’s a 10 hour time difference. These are not conditions that you would typically call ripe for collaboration.
But for us at Behind Bars, collaboration is the core of everything we do. Our experience has shown us that working as closely as possible with our clients yields the best results.
The people we work with usually have valuable and insightful operational knowledge that is a real asset for us when we are creating a bar station for a specific venue or concept. The people that are going to be working on that bar, or responsible for the results of that bar, or for gauging the return on investment of that bar, often have precious insights into what a bar needs to be for a specific venue.
And collaboration with the team from Four Pillars was essential because their project was so ambitious. For those who have been living in a cave, Four Pillars Gin is a distillery based just outside Melbourne, in Healesville, Australia. Their gin is some of the best in the world and as they grew, they wanted to build a place to call home in Sydney. A place where they could introduce more people to their gin, educate people and do some smaller, crazier, distillations. Basically, the venue was going to be their kind of shopfront/ brand home and so needed to represent everything the company and brand stands for. The bar stations themselves also needed to be special, and so they called us.
Of the collaborative process, James Irvine, Director for Gin Drinks at Four Pillars, had this to say;
“We had some ideas in mind, we really wanted to create a cutting-edge deigned bar, but at the same time, we wanted to have the warmth and welcoming nature that is hospitality. The working process with Behind Bars was surreal, to put it frankly. We worked on different sides of the planet using Virtual Reality technology. We were able to test countertop heights, width of drawers, the way that doors opened inwardly towards the bar and watching this all come to fruition was really quite satisfying”.
“To see changes in the virtual world realised in the real world was a really smart way to work. We got exactly what we first dreamed of.”
As a company, Behind Bars has always been aware that we could, potentially, build relationships all around the world. In today’s world, distance is no barrier to creating these relationships, but given the nature of what we do, and that collaboration is so important, we have invested strategically in technology from quite an early stage.
We understand that for our clients, precision, cost, and time are very important factors, and we find that being able to supply models quickly and efficiently in 3D allows people to quickly spot things they’d like to change or that need re-thinking. Sometimes an idea sounds good, but when you see it in scale, you realise there are problems.
With Virtual Reality, we can have up to 13 people at different locations around the world, inside a 1 to 1 model, experiencing their bar all at the same time. We can make real-time adjustments to try out different solutions. This allows different stakeholders an opportunity to give their input, which is super valuable. It saves time, it saves costs, and it helps eliminate mistakes or, ‘If only we’d thought of that’ moments. This technology effectively allows us to shrink the world or eliminate distance and get closer to our clients, which is essential.
And the coolest part? The technology of communication is only getting stronger and we at Behind Bars cannot wait to see what will help us bring us closer to our clients in the future!
Got a project you’d like to collaborate on? Get in touch!
SHARE THIS ARTICLE
