Every sign in a Häagen-Dazs café, Mumbai: lit letters, pink neon, prints, clocks and a vinyl-wrapped cupboard

The brief

The café’s architect gave Orchid all of its signage while she took care of the furniture, paint and electrics. The brand came with its own detailed guidelines, so there was very little left to our own taste. And, as in every mall, the work on site could only happen overnight.

What we made

We read the guidelines first, made our proposal for the architect’s approval, and started fabrication only after she approved it.

Outside, the name went up in English and in Marathi in 3D letters 2.5 inches deep, with white acrylic faces and natural white LEDs inside, plus the oval logo on the curved front, all drilled onto the ACP fascia the furniture team had put up. Letter sides usually come in a handful of standard colours; this brand’s maroon isn’t one of them, so we mixed and tested paint batch after batch until the sides matched the brand colour and the store’s walls. The faces sit flush, with no visible edge.

For the sit-out, we printed bright, sharp photos on polyester photo film for a gallery wall. The client had them framed, and our team hung them.

Inside, we printed the menus behind the counter (the architect’s team set them behind acrylic), and bent pink LED neon into the quote “Someday all ice cream is going to be made like this” and into a coffee cup beside the counter. Every word of the quote sits on its own piece of clear acrylic cut to its shape, fixed separately yet lined up as one sentence, with the wiring out of sight.

The four clocks on the wooden wall were made in our workshop to the architect’s design: three round ones and a star, cut from layered acrylic, her design printed straight onto them, and the clock movements she supplied fitted in. They are the first made-to-design clocks we have built.

A three-door storage cupboard at the back of the counter was wrapped edge to edge in Wyte polymeric vinyl printed with a melting-ice-cream design, so it now reads as part of the wall rather than a cupboard.

Everything was built in Pune, driven to Mumbai and installed overnight: we organised the tempo, our team’s travel, the mall’s night-work permission and gate passes for our fitters. We started at 8 pm, and by 8:30 the next morning the café was ready.