Madisonville is a river town of a little over a thousand people, sitting on the Tchefuncte just off the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, about forty minutes from New Orleans if the Causeway is behaving. It is not the sort of place most photo booth companies are thinking about.
Which is why we like it. Our newest venue placement partner is at Cherrybomb Coffee Co. on Covington Street, and it is one of the best matched rooms we have installed into.
The room came first
Cherrybomb was started by Noah McLain, a Covington native who began roasting beans in his garage in 2019 as a side project. That became an in-house roasting operation, a catering business running coffee carts across the Gulf South, and three shops: Baton Rouge, Mandeville, and this one.
The Madisonville shop has a proper diner counter. Oak top, chrome footrail, red vinyl stools with the ring bases. Pale blush walls, white divided light windows, a concrete floor worn in the way concrete floors get when a place is actually used. It opens at 6:30 in the morning.
When a room already has that much character, the job is not to introduce something new. It is to build something that looks like it has been there since before anyone working there was born.
What we built
The booth is our Classic booth in walnut and brushed aluminum, and every finish came off the room rather than out of a catalogue.
The curtain is deep red velvet instead of the natural canvas we use outdoors. With red vinyl stools four feet away, canvas would have read as a separate project parked next to the diner. Velvet in that red makes the booth and the counter look like they were ordered at the same time.
Inside, a warm mustard ceiling panel over deep red means the light landing on your face is warm rather than clinical. That is not decoration. Warm bounce is most of why people look better in an enclosed booth than in a phone photo. The floor mat is red and white diagonal checkerboard, which picks up the diner language without anyone having to say the word retro out loud.
We designed the panels for Cherrybomb specifically: a checkerboard band, PHOTOS in tall red letters, a hand drawn mascot, and the only instruction anybody needs, 3 POSES, 2 PRINTS. Someone walking past with a coffee gets the whole proposition in a second and a half.
There is also a contactless reader and a QR code below the screen. We are unromantic about this. Coin only booths photograph beautifully and leave most of their money on the table, because nobody is carrying change and nobody will break a note at the register on impulse. Impulse is the entire business.
{{button}}
Whose booth is it
The detail we are most pleased with is on the welcome screen. It reads: Welcome to the Cherrybomb Photobooth. Insert, tap, or swipe to begin. You've got this.
That is Cherrybomb's logo, colours and voice. Not ours. We build the machine and keep it running, but from the customer's side this is the Cherrybomb photo booth, the same way the coffee is Cherrybomb's coffee. A booth that shouts about the company who made it is an advertisement sitting in somebody else's dining room. A booth wearing the venue's name is part of the venue.
That last line was not ours either, and it is lovely writing. Almost everybody hesitates in front of a booth screen for a second, especially alone or on a first date. One short sentence at the right moment does more for usage than any signage on the outside.
A booth that works before noon
Most of our installations live in nightlife. A coffee shop opening at 6:30 AM is a different rhythm, and we were curious about it.
What happens is that the booth gets used across the whole day rather than in one burst: people waiting on an order, teenagers after school, somebody's grandmother visiting, a first date that needed something to do with its hands. Lower peaks, much longer tail. Daytime also means competing with real light through those big windows, which is one more reason the interior runs warm and the curtain is heavy enough to properly black out a room.
Small towns are underrated for this too. In a place of a thousand people, a booth in the coffee shop is not one option among forty. It becomes the thing you do there, and the same people use it for years rather than once on a night out. Nigel's in Seaside, Florida taught us the same lesson.
Where this sits in our work
The Madisonville install belongs to a run of daytime and retail placements alongside the nightlife work: LOQUI in a Playa Vista food hall, Fred Segal Home in Malibu, and our cafe activation for Caffè Guess in New York. Different rooms, same principle.
It is also our first booth in Louisiana, and we would happily have more.
Want one in your room?
We design and build custom vintage photo booths for coffee shops, diners, bars, hotels and museums, install them permanently through our venue placement program, and maintain them so nobody on your team has to think about it. For a single event, we also handle photo booth rental and brand activations nationwide.
Tell us about your room and what you want people to feel when they walk in. We will design something that looks like it has always been there.
{{button}}
.webp)
.webp)