We help you with Strategic workshop

The tower above the mall was full of creative agencies. Gojek’s headquarters sat next door. The traffic Pasaraya needed was never going to arrive from South Jakarta’s luxury corridors - it was already in the building.

So we stopped chasing glamour and built a creative hub instead. Placemaking came first: we brought Record Store Day to Pasaraya, a natural match for a district that has belonged to Jakarta’s vinyl community for decades. That crowd does not dress for SCBD or PIK - faded tees, flip-flops, nothing polished - and it spends. Read a market by its clothes and you will miss the wallet.

It worked. The event drew the largest crowd Blok M had seen in a decade and the news picked it up, which handed the building something it had not had in years: a reason to be talked about. From there the door was open. Skandara curated and signed the tenants that define what Pasaraya is today.

Most retail projects begin with a traffic problem. This one did not. A busy halte in a prime corridor already moves more people past a storefront than most malls do.

The hard part was internal. TransJakarta knows how to run bus stops; servicing retail tenants is a different discipline entirely. What reads as routine maintenance on a halte is existential for an F&B tenant - water and power are not tickets in a queue, they are the difference between trading and not trading that day. Fix the response time and you fix the tenancy.

So the work runs on three tracks. Placemaking first: a food festival inside a bus stop, to prove the space could hold a crowd that came to stay rather than to transfer. Then tenant acquisition. And underneath both, capability - a bootcamp called Fundamental Retail Operation, built for the commercial team and the operations and facility team together, so the people signing the lease and the people fixing the plumbing work from the same playbook.

The problem was structural. Parking is minimal, so most people arrive by public transport - and in Jakarta, the upper-income consumer does not ride public transport. The mall was pulling real crowds, just not the crowd its price list had been written for. Those visitors were spending, only outside, at the street hawkers ringing the building.

Rather than argue with the traffic, we tested against it. We took empty space on the second floor and turned it into a food festival - cheap to stand up, quick to read, and a live experiment in tenant-visitor fit run against the people actually walking through the doors.

Spending moved inside. More valuable than the revenue was the evidence: management came out of it knowing which tenants the real footfall would pay for, and could build the mix around that instead of around the original brief.

The role sat inside the business rather than beside it - ten direct reports and a commercial organisation of roughly 110 people underneath. Advice a manufacturer this size can politely ignore does not move it. A line role does.

Four interventions ran in parallel. A go-to-market strategy that was actually executed, with joint business plans landed across modern trade and general trade execution tightened to match. A portfolio revamp, cutting what the shelf no longer wanted and backing what it did. An organisational restructure, so the plan had people accountable for it. And a two-stage brand relaunch built around a funnel that converted, not one that only built awareness.

Two record years followed, back to back. The bottom line grew on a leaner advertising and promotion ratio, not a heavier one - the growth was bought with sharper allocation rather than more spend.

Modern trade does not forgive a general-trade playbook. The shelf is planned, the space is negotiated, and the pack that moves in a warung is not the pack that moves in a convenience chain. A distributor team that learned the trade by instinct can work hard and still lose the aisle.

The programme runs on three blocks. First the store itself - shopper journey, store zones, picture of success, and the occasion-brand-pack-price-channel logic that decides what belongs where. Then territory management across modern trade and MIC, so coverage is planned rather than inherited. Then category management and category selling through SIMAC: arguing for space with the category's numbers instead of the brand's enthusiasm.

It is deliberately hands-on - interactive sessions, group discussion, case studies and a mini-workshop, capped at thirty participants so nobody hides at the back. And it is built to outlive us: a one-day core programme followed by a one-day train-the-trainer, so CCEP's own people can keep running the College after we leave the room.

The show was built around a specific argument: that you cannot separate Indonesian contemporary art from the music it grew up next to. Since the early 2000s the visual language of Jakarta's independent music scene - sleeve art, gig posters, merch, the identity a collective builds for itself - has shaped the country's visual culture as much as any gallery has. Cultural Clashing put that case on a wall in Japan.

The artist group was led by Sir Dandy, a musician and visual artist, and included Oomleo of ruangrupa, the collective that served as artistic director of documenta 15 in 2022. Sixteen creators in total - artists, musicians, designers and community organisers, most of them holding more than one of those roles at once. Work was exhibited and offered for sale, alongside merchandise made for the show.

Placemaking is the practice underneath our retail work: find the community that is already there, give it a room, and let the commerce follow. This is the same discipline pointed outward. “An effort to build bridges between Indonesian and Japanese artists,” as our Managing Director Mayang Puspita Lestari described it, “creating space for mutual understanding and discovery” - and a set of relationships meant to outlast the nine days.