What’s the Mast Brothers formula?
What a pleasant surprise. What started as a light confusion, triggered your senses to wake up and respond: what’s this? (confusion), some kind of climax, wow this is beautiful. Keep going.
Mast Brothers is based in East-London’s Red Church St., right between contemporary art galleries, design shops and a one minute walk from the Shoreditch House. This spot has a very high concentration of London’s creative class passing through. Not the poor ones. The established ones.
Walking inside feels like serendipity. That’s because Mast Brothers try to respond to the state of mind you are in. Most people to go Red Church St. to see something new (art and design) to stimulate their senses. Mast Brothers know this and so they play around with your expectations. What looks like random occurrence at first is actually a carefully designed “contextual” marketing strategy. A mind fuck.
You pass by Mast Brothers and see a raw-looking pallet jack and some cacao bags. It makes you pause and think: “what’s that?” The flashy neon sign reminds of Tracy Emin. You walk in thinking this must be a good gallery. When you enter you do not find art. You were misled, and that’s fine. You experience something new.
Entering the shop is somewhat surreal. Spacey music and women in lab coats arranging products. It takes about 5 seconds to realise what this place is about. Is it a gallery? No. A factory? No. It is a chocolate shop.
The chocolates on display are produced in the facility behind the window. The neat looking production site tells a story about the art of chocolate making. A story which you normally (don’t) read on product packaging or in magazines, now comes to life in front of your own eyes.
The neat looking production site changes your perception of the quality. You value those chocolates because you can see how they are made. You are paying for what you see. It looks like it’s worth it. Transparency is key.
The menu is simple. £3 for a chocolate (is nothing). When you look closer you find that a box with twelve chocolate bars is £85. But who likes to talk about money? This is not about chocolate. This is about stimulating your senses.
The experience of visiting the shop elevates the chocolate above their functional aspect. Mast Brothers anchored art in your mind. It’s meant to please you simply by looking at it.
The store layout strongly resembles that of the Apple temples. Apple trademarked its store layout as — “distinctive symmetrical wooden benches on which products are laid out within a large, white space”). What they borrowed from Apple is more than just colours and materials, it’s a kind of simplicity.
The chocolate itself looks simple. It doesn’t have any engravings or decorative elements you would typically find with high quality chocolates. The taste is good. There is an interesting use of ingredients (such as goats milk). The flavours are not straight forward. These are the grace notes by which Mast Brothers differentiate themselves.
If you could place the Mast Brothers brand on an operation table and cut it open with a scalpel, you would see a kind of harmony. It’s a brand which understands its audience. Through it’s shop location, Mast Brothers play with their external environment of art galleries and design shops, by pretending to be one. This mischievous act, allows Mast Brothers to surprise you with something “new” and more interesting which most of the contemporary art galleries in the street give you. To see the artful process of chocolate making with your own eyes, creates a story in your mind to tell someone. The rawness of the production process and materials makes everything very real, which in turn gives off the feeling of authenticity, which in turn affects price. Authenticity is valuable. Transparency is marketing. During your visit, Mast Brother’s give you room to think in a space which feels pleasantly familiar, with a kind of Apple simplicity. A simplicity which does not only come about through it’s store lay-out, but also in the product and packaging design. This chocolate looks new.
Written by Elco Ian with help from Francesca, Robert and Karan.
