Founders Coffee: Donavan Robinson- Make Them Feel Something – Turning Products, Services, and Everyday Interactions into Memorable Experiences

The Speaker 

Donavan Robinson is a Red River Métis entrepreneur, experience designer, facilitator, and founder of Pop CoLab, a strategic play lab that helps teams connect, create, and work better together. With more than 20 years of entrepreneurial experience, Donavan has worked across marketing, hospitality, retail, and community-building through ventures including Vantage Studios, A Little Pizza Heaven, The Good Will Social Club, Made Here, and Pop CoLab. Across each business, his focus has remained the same: creating meaningful experiences that make people feel welcomed, valued, and connected. Today, Donavan works with organizations, small businesses, and community groups to design memorable customer and team experiences, helping others clarify their value, strengthen customer touchpoints, and build businesses people remember and recommend.

The Talk

Make Them Feel Something explores how small-business owners, artists, and entrepreneurs can create memorable customer experiences at every stage of their business — before, during, and after a sale. Drawing on Donavan Robinson’s 20+ years across hospitality, marketing, retail, and community-building, this interactive session moves through four practical frameworks: getting clear on who you’re actually serving, sharpening your value proposition around feeling rather than just product, mapping the customer journey to find the moments that matter most, and making small, low-cost changes that create outsized impact.

Participants start with a live warm-up that surfaces the session’s core idea that people remember how they were treated far more than what they bought — then work through real tools and worksheets they can apply immediately to their own business. Along the way, Donavan shares stories from his own ventures, from a neighbourhood live music venue to a strategic play lab, showing what this looks like in practice.

The session closes with open Q&A, so attendees leave with both a framework and answers to their specific questions.