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Client Success Story · Cross-Border
Digital menu boards, custom LED and window displays across three KIN Coffee sites in two jurisdictions — Newry, Dublin Road in Dundalk and Ballymascanlon. One brand, two currencies on the boards, and content built and kept current by our own studio.
A coffee brand operating either side of the border, where the screens have to look identical and say slightly different things.
The estate
Three sites is not a big number. Three sites across a border is a different problem entirely.
Sites
Currencies on the boards
Screen formats
Content platform
Three sites, two jurisdictions
A brand that trades in sterling on one side of the road network and euro on the other, with customers who use both.
Plenty of customers use more than one of these forecourts in the same week. That is exactly why the screens have to match — the moment the boards look different from site to site, the brand starts to feel like three separate businesses that happen to share a name.
Why it matters
The cross-border part is not a novelty. It is the constraint the whole system had to be designed around.
A menu board in Newry prices in sterling. The same drink, on the same brand, twenty minutes down the road in Dundalk prices in euro. The layout should be identical, the photography should be identical, the typeface and the spacing and the promotion running underneath should all be identical — and the numbers should not be.
Handled badly, that turns into two sets of artwork that drift apart within months. Somebody updates the southern boards for a new promotion and the northern ones sit a campaign behind. A price changes on one side and not the other. Within a year the estate looks like it is run by three different people.
Handled properly, it is one design with a per-site price layer. One update goes out, every board changes, and each one shows the right figure in the right currency for the forecourt it is standing on.
What went in
A forecourt coffee offer has to be seen from the road, from the pump and from the queue. That is three different distances and three different screens.
Behind the counter, carrying the full range, sizes, prices and allergen information, laid out to read from the back of the queue rather than from arm's length.
Built to the site rather than bought off a shelf, sized for the wall or the canopy it was going onto and bright enough to hold up outdoors.
High-brightness screens facing out, doing the work of catching somebody who has pulled in for fuel and has not yet decided about coffee.
Our studio builds and refreshes the artwork, so the boards carry current promotions instead of whatever was loaded the week they went in.
The detail
The mechanics behind “they all look the same”.
Designed once, used everywhere. Layout, typography, photography and structure are fixed in templates, so a new promotion drops into the same frame at all three sites.
Sterling in Newry, euro in Louth. The design is shared, the figures are not. Each board pulls the pricing that belongs to the forecourt it is on.
One update, every screen. Promotions and seasonal changes go out from one place, so no site sits a campaign behind another.
Morning offer, afternoon offer. The coffee trade on a forecourt is not the same at eight in the morning as at four in the afternoon, and the boards do not pretend otherwise.
Brightness specified for a forecourt. Screens facing glass or open air run at high brightness, because a display that reads indoors is grey behind a window at midday.
Our studio, on an ongoing basis. The most common failure in digital signage is not hardware; it is content nobody has changed in eight months.
On site
Photographs from Newry, Dublin Road and Ballymascanlon.
On our own doorstep
Our workshop is in Dundalk. Two of these forecourts are minutes away and the third is up the road.
It matters more than it sounds. A content change can be checked in person. A fault is a short drive rather than a scheduled visit. And when something needs to be looked at before the morning trade, it can be.
It also means the screens were built by people who know these forecourts — where the sun hits the window in the afternoon, which wall the queue actually faces, and how the site is used by people crossing the border for work every day.
The result
A customer who fills up in Newry on Monday and in Dundalk on Thursday sees the same coffee brand both times.
That consistency is the entire point. It is what turns three forecourts into one recognisable offer, and it is what makes a promotion worth running — because it lands everywhere at once rather than at whichever site somebody got round to.
The boards change from a desk, the artwork is built by people who know the brand, and the currency looks after itself.
“A short line from KIN or NCO about the boards or the content.”
Name, role — KIN Coffee / NCOMore like this
Same problem, different counters.
If your brand runs in sterling and euro, the screens can still be identical. Tell us how many sites you have and where they are, and we will show you how the pricing layer works.