February 2014 • www.specialty-coffee.com | 39
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obody starts a coee shop to sell merchandise. Between
making the best coee and keeping the store running,
merchandise can be an aerthought.
Stores that see the best success spend a lot of time learning
their customer base and experimenting before they nd
something that really resonates.
FINDING A HIT
Danny O'Neill at the Roasterie in Kansas City, Missouri sells
a lot of mugs and shirts as well as a fair number of posters in
the company's signature Art Deco style. But one of his most
popular items is as classic as the style, and it turned into a hit
because of a bit of "dumb luck."
"Lunch pails: that's another thing that's been incredibly
popular. We have an embossed lunch pail with our plane on it
and we have sold thousands of those," O'Neill says, adding that
they had lunch pails for years but slapped a simple branded
sticker on the front. It wasn't until a friend who spent time in
China suggested looking into an overseas embosser.
"I think we've ordered 10,000 so far," he says. at kind of
overhead and storage might seem daunting, but he says it was
worth that hassle.
"e only thing we had to do is order a lot of them and wait
a while for them to come, but you know what, we're not going
anywhere and they're pretty popular," he says.
For Greg Martin at Urban Bean Coee in Minneapolis, Minn.,
T
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F
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BY N I C H O L A S U P TO N
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