Room: Websites
Still Life with Checkout
A small Prague coffee roaster sold beans by phone and at a market stall. Now they sell them while they sleep, on a site that weighs less than one of their old photos.
Curator's note
Pražírna Vltava roasts twice a week in a former garage in Holešovice. Orders came by phone, by email and on scraps of paper at the Saturday market. They wanted a shop that takes orders for each roast, closes itself when a roast sells out, and that the roaster can edit with coffee on his hands.
From the visitors' book
“I used to answer the phone forty times on a roast day. Now I roast.”
Wall text
The work began, as many do, with a stopwatch: forty-one phone calls on a single roast day, each one about two minutes long. The shop’s first job was to make those calls unnecessary.
The roast is the product
Every roast is its own little sale: it opens when the roaster announces it, takes orders until the beans are spoken for, and closes itself. Customers see what’s left in real time, and nobody pays for coffee that doesn’t exist.
Small, on purpose
The whole shop weighs 190 kB with its photos. No carousels, no pop-ups, no cart drawer that slides in from the side: a bag, a roast date and a button.
Installation views
Visitors are allowed to photograph the beans. The beans are allowed to sell out.
Provenance
- Orders placed online
- Before: 0%After: 74%
- Weight of the shop page
- After: 190 kB
- Lighthouse, all four
- After: 100
Materials
- Astro
- Stripe
- Supabase
- Cloudflare
