The Perfect Shot
STAY GOLDEN Coffee Co. in Nashville.
welcoming to customers walking through the door, making it an experience that guests want to share with their friends. The light walls, pops of color, and lack of barriers not only create a sense of lighthearted transparency and openness, but also do double duty by allowing natural sunlight to flood the space, making it an Instagrammer’s dream photo location. It’s no coincidence that the Stay Golden tagged feed is filled with well-lit shots of signature drinks, menu items, and the space itself. Everything—from the chic yet minimally presented beverages and marble tabletop backgrounds to the beautifully lush indoor plants and impeccable lighting—makes it easy for folks to take a beautiful photo worth sharing.
Building a Business on the ‘Gram Tracking the actual impact of Instagram on your business can be difficult. Posting pictures out into the void and
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tracking followers can sometimes seem like a time-consuming task without reward, but there can be tangible real-world benefits from the digital community. Tohm Ifergan decided that he wanted a different kind of account to set his café and coffee subscription service, Dayglow, apart. He thought that highly stylized product photography would be a way to distinguish his brand from other companies. “I wanted to do something that essentially put more focus on the products that we’re selling. And in this case, the coffees themselves,” explains Ifergan. “Our brand is built around a holographic foil [that’s] essentially our color. We use that element in our social media, switching off different colors every couple of weeks and try to highlight or accent certain elements of the drinks that we’re selling or the coffees that are selling that month.” As a result of this method, Ifergan, with photographer Kingston of Vacant House, creates a series of monochro-
matic images that feature a single product or coffee in front of a brightly colored background. “That’s actually another reason why our palette really works, because there’s a lot of contrast and so much color fills the space. So when you’re scrolling it really pops,” says Ifergan. “‘Instagrammable,’ to me, means anything that is eye-catching in less than seconds.” Creating the unique images is certainly an investment in both time and finances. Dayglow spends roughly 10% of its revenue on marketing and an entire day each month is spent in the café’s parking lot getting the candy-colored images, not to mention the time taken to edit them as well. Ifergan reports that the efforts pay off though: Roughly one in three customers on any given day say they discovered Dayglow through Instagram, and the platform has allowed the company to build a global following. “We had numerous people from like Russia or Europe or Australia reach out to us or become fans of us because of
PHOTOS COURTESY OF STAY GOLDEN
