When Naina Kansal decided to launch a pop-up restaurant that paid homage to the Indian street snacks of her youth, she had plenty of logistics to figure out.
The year was 2020 and finding a commercial kitchen was a challenge. Her menu was ever-evolving as customers started to request nostalgic favourites. Then there was the question of how fast she wanted to grow. Thankfully, one aspect of her business was surprisingly simple. Customer support was quickly solidified, thanks to an old-school loyalty card with a whimsical look and feel, including bright colours and fanciful artwork.
Her Barrhaven-based business, Tapri Chai, is just one of many Ottawa cafes that are keeping loyalty programs streamlined and card-based. Forget about complicated apps and points programs. The concept is as simple as it gets. Customers buy a certain number of drinks, their card is stamped each time, and they eventually get a drink for free.
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At Tapri Chai, customers claim their reward after six orders of chai. “It didn’t make sense for us back then to have a full-blown loyalty program and we found these cards to be really cute. You feel like they’re tangible. And I think there’s some excitement to that,” Kansal said.
It’s a sentiment that Red Door Provisions in New Edinburgh shares.
“I think people are always pleasantly surprised that we have a loyalty card when they first discover them at the shop,” said Donna Leo, the café’s manager. When it comes to coffee, she said customers are spoiled for choice in Ottawa and offering a classic loyalty card is a concrete way to strengthen the customer-café relationship.
“It’s a nice way to reward their loyalty to our business as there are so many other places that they can choose to get their morning/daily fix.”
The only thing sweeter than the rewards of a free drink are the cards themselves. Instead of prosaic black-and-white productions, these loyalty cards are bursting with colour. The design chosen by Red Door Provisions features – you guessed it – a jaunty stylized red door that evokes the real-life facade of the shop. Meanwhile, visitors to Tapri Chai are greeted with bright blue cards featuring a cheerful orange marigold motif. At least, they will be for now. The design is ever-evolving and Kansal says she changes up the base colour with every shipment. She shares that, in addition to the marigolds: “We’ve also tried incorporating several commonly seen Indian things like paisley, trucks, Indian cycle rickshaws.”
Everything at Tapri Chai, from the marketing materials to the café itself, has a pop of colour and having colourful loyalty cards was the natural extension of that, she says.
“We designed them on Canva and they were pretty easy,” Kansal shares, adding, “Early on, we used to use a punchhole with a regular star shape. But then we thought, okay, we should just get an old school stamp. So our stamps have a little kettle on them.”
Other examples of whimsical cards around town include Cumberland’s Black Walnut Bakery, where the coffee cards are festooned with colourful birds, squirrels and rolling pins, and Elgin Street’s Meow Tea, which offers a cat-themed card purr-fect for bubble tea enthusiasts. So will more cafes join suit? Kansal makes a compelling case for it, saying: “I think these small little gestures, they just bring out that café vibe.”
At Red Door Provisions and Tapri Chai, bright colours help ensure that their cards never get lost in crowded wallets but, funnily enough, Leo says it’s not a bad thing when people temporarily forget what’s in their bag.
“Having a loyalty card tucked away in your wallet is out of sight, out of mind and most people don’t track it,” she says. “So it becomes a nice little discovery for the customer when they come in to order coffee and see that they have earned themselves a free coffee for supporting a local business such as Red Door Provisions.”
