Bad Brief, Bad Business
A Frequency post by Alex Kratena
Alex Kratena is a multi-award-winning bartender and entrepreneur, co-founder of Muyu liqueurs, Tayēr RTD, London’s acclaimed Tayēr + Elementary, and Like Minded Creatures, a multi-sensory drinks industry travel party. He’s also the creative force behind Tayēr Studios, a hybrid gallery, cocktail lab, and retail space, and most recently, Kyara—a postmodern cocktail bar concept brought to life at SLS Barcelona.
At Everything Now, we didn’t create Kyara; but we did work alongside Alex and the Tayēr team to shape the bar’s full opening strategy, including go-to-market approach and brand activation. What connected us was a shared belief: that great ideas only work when they’re built on function, clarity, and purpose.
This Frequency post goes to the heart of that belief; on why so many hospitality concepts fall apart before the first drink is even served.
Tayēr + Elementary
There are usually two ways most hospitality concepts come to life:
You create the concept first and then look for the perfect location.
Or you’re handed a location and try to build a concept around it.
In medium to large-scale projects, it’s rare that the actual operators are involved from day one. And that’s a big problem. Without the people who will run the place at the table early on, designers often make poor decisions—ones that look great on paper but fall apart in service.
So how do you fix that disconnect between design and operations?
Start with this:
the better the brief, the better the outcome.
But it only works if everyone is actually aligned and if there’s real project management holding it together.
Too often, we see beautifully designed spaces with the functional equivalent of a generic engine under the hood. In hospitality terms, that means a slick venue with a bar or kitchen that simply can’t handle the pressure of a full house.
I see dozens of briefs every year, and I’m still shocked by how many generic concepts raise serious money without any real attention to how they’ll work. Everyone talks about scale and growth, but no one wants to talk about whether the bar has enough fridges.
And that’s the real issue. A successful venue will eventually hit its peak service moment, when the space is full, the energy is right, and demand is through the roof. If you can’t deliver fast enough in that moment, because your set-up sucks, you lose revenue you’ll never get back. Meanwhile, your costs stay the same.
Those who can deliver during the peak make more money, plain and simple. And that all starts with smart, operational design.
Good design isn’t just about what it looks like. It’s about how it works.
A well-designed venue needs fewer staff.
A bar with enough refrigeration sells more drinks.
Proper storage reduces glassware breakage (most of it caused by cramped, rushed dishwashing, not guests).
This isn’t theory. It’s cash, efficiency, and long-term survival.
And yet, too often the design process is ego-driven. Designers don’t admit when they lack operational knowledge. Architects don’t consult bartenders. Operators are looped in too late.
We need to flip the process:
Form should follow function. Always.
The brief should start with how the place works, not just how it looks. That alone would save countless projects from ending up over budget, under-performing, or impossible to scale.
Some venues are specified down to the millimeter… only to discover that a few “creative liberties” taken by the architect shifted something by a few centimeters, just enough to wreck the service flow.
Honestly, maybe we should just hang out more.
