Artisanal craftsman, Mike Robinson, creates bespoke furniture and housewares in the United Kingdom. Although Robinson specializes in wood and wood-based sheet stock, he often incorporates metals and plastics into his designs, depending on the client’s specifications. For this particular application he utilized various finishes of Dibond aluminum composite material for a series of point of sale displays for Red Bull in the UK.

The marketing team at UK Red Bull was eager to have numerous small refrigerators on bar tops as a promotional tool, Robinson explains. Realizing that small refrigerators were still too large, Robinson was tasked with creating something similar to a fridge, but smaller and lighter in weight. For this, he specified three innovative Dibond aluminum composite finishes for the major brand’s displays.

“There are a number of reasons Dibond was specified for this particular design, the ability to v-groove and fold the material to create the desired shape, each of the machining operations required for the design could be carried out on wood working machines meaning all processes could be kept in house. Also, the colors available gave the customer a really great range to choose from, in the end they picked Butler Finish, Mirror Gold, and Mirror Anthracite.”

Interestingly, and unbeknownst to many Red Bull fans in North America, the infamous ‘Red Bull and Vodka’ drink actually originated in the UK and has been used as a mixer there since the mid 1990s. The drink didn’t gain the same notoriety in the US until a few years later, but was interestingly discovered by Joe Romanazzi in a London nightclub. So, these bar top displays are quite perfect for the UK’s bar scene.

information and photography courtesy of Mike Robinson Furniture