Starfish Loves Coffee is an award-winning brunch spot in London. By day it is a celebrity boozy brunch spot, and by night, on Friday and Saturday evenings, the venue provides a cocktail bar and tapas. The company chose to work with Stampede, a provider of unified guest engagement technology, to work on customer retention. Aykut Hilmi, Artistic Director and Co-founder at Starfish Loves Coffee, discusses how the platform has helped boost customer loyalty, increase bookings and provide vital statistics to help the brunch house grow.
Starfish Loves Coffee, a boozy brunch destination in London, has grown its customer relationships and maintained customer retention using Stampede’s guest engagement platform. Stampede’s solution has enabled Starfish Loves Coffee to increase bookings and enhance its marketing and customer engagement, raising customer retention to around 85-90%.
In November 2025, Starfish Loves Coffee celebrated its 10-year Jubilee. As part of the celebrations, it unveiled a new Sunday French Brasserie menu and wanted to develop an outreach campaign to customers that would generate immediate excitement – and guarantee full bookings for the first two Sundays in November. To achieve this, the team created an exclusive, time-sensitive, 50%-off promotion for guests who booked within a four-hour window of receiving the marketing campaign: an offer designed to spark urgency and introduce loyal and new diners to Starfish Loves Coffee’s updated menu.
By using the Stampede Marketing Workflows module, the Starfish Loves Coffee team launched an automated campaign that:
- Emailed their Jubilee guest list with the limited-time offer
- Detected bookings made inside the four-hour promotional window
- Instantly sent qualifying guests their 50%-off voucher
- Tagged those guests into a new segment for future targeted campaigns
Stampede’s guest engagement platform has been built from the ground up specifically for hospitality, meaning every module works seamlessly together. Marketing automation, guest Wi-Fi, table bookings, payments, loyalty and reviews are connected in real-time, giving operators a complete picture of their guests and the insights needed to act fast. With these capabilities, marketing teams can trigger campaigns based on guest behaviour, managers can see which promotions drive the most covers and front-of-house teams can recognise loyal customers the moment they walk in.
For Starfish Loves Coffee, using this technology to support its Jubilee campaign resulted in booking out every table within hours. It delivered the two packed-out Sundays that the operator wanted, and it created the ideal launchpad for the new menu, long-term customer loyalty and customer loyalty and retention.
Aykut Hilmi, Artistic Director and Co-founder at Starfish Loves Coffee, took the time to sit down with Intelligent SME.tech to talk about the partnership.
Why did you create Starfish Loves Coffee? What gap in the market did you see?
Starfish Loves Coffee came about because we had moved back into the area. I’m an actor (I do a lot of film) and at the time, we just had a baby, and there was nothing around – no coffee houses, no brunch houses. My wife, Ingrid, [Berg, fellow Co-founder) and I walked past the shop and said how beautiful it was and a week later the proprietor said to me that he was selling the place and I said to him, I’ll take it off you.
At the time, Ingrid had just finished Harry Potter, and I just had finished Fantastic Beasts, and Ingrid didn’t want to be in the business anymore. We had fallen in love with coffee over the past five years, speciality coffee, and our heart was set on this fantastic specialty coffee shop. And we opened up, and that’s it in a nutshell. And we called it Starfish and Coffee because I’m a huge, massive Prince fan. And while we were going through the documentation and everything, I heard the song and I said that’s the name of the shop, and it was as simple as that. And we went from doing coffee to doing food and brunch, and it grew from that. And that’s how Starfish began; on a whim.
What are the main challenges facing the hospitality industry at the moment?
I can say lockdown was far easier than it is now, with the exclamation mark point. Lockdown, you knew where you stood. You had the drive to do certain new menus, certain takeaways, etc, you knew where you were going. And at the same time, it gave you an excitement of developing your company even further.
Because everyone was at home, working from home, we were full. And then what happened? When everyone went back to work and changed their muscle memory. The lockdown pattern disintegrated. And that’s what happened to local restaurants and local shops like myself, because the people went back to the busy commercial sites that had a business running 24/7.
We had built up a turnover, I think, from Wednesday to Sunday (we are not open Mondays and Tuesdays) of up to £1,200 pound a day during the week and then after lockdown on Wednesday and Thursday, that went down to £400. That’s a significant drop, because nobody was spending £20 on breakfast up until 12 o’clock and having great coffee and breakfast and socialising. You’re talking about at least a 40 to 50% significant change.
And now everything’s gone up. Business rates have just doubled for me. Corporation tax has gone up. I could say loads more, but all these challenges are part of us growing and continuing to find out new ways.
What has been a challenge is not necessarily all the bills. The challenge for me is growth and I made a really firm decision that I wanted to not work on new customers, I wanted to work on retention. And retention for me means bringing everyone back – they eat at ours, not once but four times a week, if they can. Because they want to, because they love what they are eating, because they love socialising when they come through the door. They love their name being spoken.
Why did you choose to work with Stampede?
We’ve done social media with people who have got their own companies. We’ve done marketing, and I’ve seen it, and it doesn’t work. The first thing I would say is everybody’s got a brilliant video that gets loads of people ticking. Yes, great. Viewed it. Great commentary. But what it doesn’t do, it doesn’t bring people back to eat and spend money. I learned that a while back. It’s prime for a restaurant to bring people back, and that starts off with management, with the consumer. And two, is to understand what the consumer wants, and that is you following up every time after they’ve eaten, after they’ve drank, every time, and looking at the stats and understanding their lifestyle and why they’re coming back. Stampede came at a time that I was looking for that.
Yes, it does cost money. Yes, we haven’t got the money, but I’m willing to go all in while I’m working full time three months and work with Stampede and see if this can help me grow.
One of their tools that work really well for us is being on the iPad in the restaurant, looking at people’s profiles that are coming for a reservation, what they’ve eaten before, how many times they’ve been in, what they’ve drank, how much they’ve spent, and following up on that with a message going, thanks for coming in. And the workflows started doing that. For example, why didn’t you turn up? Let us give you a discount next time.
I can honestly say that right now, it’s working for us better than anything I’ve ever worked with. The communication of working on a personal basis has been more beneficial than anything our company has ever experienced. Stampede has given me that visual and hands-on experience.
You’ve mentioned five new stores in five years. But what’s next for Starfish loves Coffee?
I’ve got business plans for so many different projects. The thing about Starfish is I want to open up shops that are based on Starfish but doesn’t necessarily have to be a brunch house, for example, Starfish Loves Tapas, Starfish Loves a Pump Room. And the whole point is, I want to open up and use it as a brand, where it becomes many different shops, a different approach to what you’re experiencing. I want a few more restaurants, and I want people to experience the best atmosphere possible.
