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Since bringing its roastery tours onto Shopify with Easy Appointment Booking, Square Mile Coffee Roasters has seen:
(All figures current as of September 2026.)
How it started
Square Mile has been roasting in East London since 2008. For most of that time the relationship with the people drinking its coffee ran one way. A bag arrived in the post, and that was the visit.
The roastery itself, on an industrial estate in Walthamstow, is where the interesting part happens. Green coffee arriving, roast profiles being worked out, cupping tables laid out every morning. Square Mile wanted people to see it, so it started running tours.
Sara Larsson, Head of Education and Events, runs that programme. By 2024 it had outgrown a form and an inbox: a Saturday tour that sold out at sixteen seats, seasonal tastings, and a team keen to try one-off workshops without a month of admin each time.
[INSERT QUOTE: why the tours had to live on the Shopify store and not on a separate booking tool, and what the form-and-inbox setup was costing them before.]
— Sara Larsson, Head of Education and Events, Square Mile Coffee Roasters
Square Mile sells its coffee on Shopify Plus. The tours needed to live there too.
The challenge: A roastery is not a shop floor
A product page is not a calendar
Shopify is built to sell things that sit in a warehouse. A roastery tour is a product that happens at eleven on a Saturday, for ninety minutes, with sixteen seats. Without a calendar, the team sold it the only way a product page allows: a listing per date, the seat count as inventory, and someone resetting it every week for the next weekend. That works for a one-off. It does not work for a tour that runs every Saturday with tastings and workshops around it, and a sold-out listing only says a date is gone, not which one to offer instead.
Room to try new things
The tour is the anchor, and it sells. What the team wanted on top of it was variety: a new class here, a one-off workshop there, a chance to see what guests take to and what they don't. In spring 2025 that meant an Open Day with four workshops in one weekend, sensory skills, coffee and chocolate, latte art, and water chemistry. A Focus Series tasting on an East Timor lot ran for a single winter. Come Roast with Us put guests on the roaster for a morning. Each one was a test of what guests wanted, and each needed to go live in an afternoon, sell real seats, and come down cleanly if nobody bit.
Emails that sound like Square Mile
A confirmation from a booking tool reads like a booking tool. Square Mile's customers are used to a particular voice, and the team wanted the confirmation, the reminder the day before, and the follow-up afterwards to come from Square Mile, in Square Mile's words, with Square Mile's name on the sender line.
Nobody should check out without a date
The tour is a product on the same store as the coffee, which is the point. It also means a guest in a hurry can add it to the cart like a bag of beans, pay, and never pick a time. The team had a handful of exactly those orders, and every one of them was a phone call.
The solution: One calendar, inside the coffee shop
Square Mile put every experience on Easy Appointment Booking inside its existing Shopify store. The tour is a product with a calendar.
- Every experience is a Shopify product: the Roastery Tour and Tasting, the Focus Series, Come Roast with Us and the Open Day workshops each live on their own product page, on the same store as the coffee, with the same checkout
- Capacity per time slot: the tour is one product with a repeating Saturday schedule, and each start time carries its own sixteen seat limit. No listing per date, no weekly inventory reset, and two sessions running at once never overbook each other
- Notifications in Square Mile's voice: confirmation, a reminder twenty-four hours before, and a thank-you after the visit, all on a custom template with Square Mile as the sender
- Short-run events with no cleanup: a workshop goes live for a weekend, sells its seats, and is switched off. The bookings stay on the record
- Checkout held until a time is picked: the add to cart button waits for the calendar to load, so nobody pays for a tour they haven't scheduled
- The events team runs it: Sara's team publishes new dates, adjusts capacity, and pulls booking lists without going through the web team
[INSERT QUOTE: the one thing the setup takes off her plate every week. Ideally a specific Saturday morning detail: the host list, the sold-out tour, the confirmation in their own voice.]
— Sara Larsson
Guests who come back
The tour is not the end of the relationship. One in five guests goes on to buy coffee online after their visit, and keeps buying. Because each booking is a Shopify order against the same customer, that pattern shows up in the customer record.
The results: The roastery is now part of the shop
In the two years since the first booking, Square Mile has taken more than 550 bookings for over 900 guests. The flagship tour alone accounts for 450 of them, spread evenly across the two years, and it is still selling out.
The spring 2025 Open Day is the clearest example of what the setup makes possible. Five workshops went live at once. Between them they took more than 80 bookings in six weeks, ran, and came off the calendar, with no lingering products and no manual reconciliation afterwards.
[INSERT QUOTE: how long it takes to put a one-off workshop live now versus before, and whether that changed what they are willing to try. The Open Day is the example to anchor it.]
— Sara Larsson
Day to day, the value is quieter. The Saturday host list is right. More than a thousand confirmations, day-before reminders and thank-you notes have gone out in Square Mile's words without anyone pressing send. A guest who bought a bag of coffee and then booked a tour is one customer in Shopify.
The booking data tells the team things a form never could. Half of all bookings are for two people, so the tour is something people bring someone to. And the bookings arrive evenly through the week, Sunday busiest and Saturday quietest, which is the shape you would expect when people plan a weekend out in advance.
What's next
With the tour running itself, the question for Square Mile is what else the roastery can host. The Open Day showed the appetite.
[INSERT QUOTE: what she would tell another roaster or food producer thinking about running tours on Shopify.]
— Sara Larsson
Running tours, tastings or classes alongside a Shopify store, and still taking bookings through a form? Square Mile's setup is what one system looks like. The tour sells where the coffee sells, and the guest is on the same customer record from the first bag to the first visit.
