Specialty Coffee Retailer is a publication for owners, managers and employees of retail outlets that sell specialty coffee. Its scope includes best sales practices, supplies, business trends and anything else to assist the small coffee retailer.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/58144
Brandon Knudsen and his wife took almost six years between their first store (left) and their second outlet, a drive-thru. fi ts its demand: Knudsen estimates that its sales are 90 percent coff ee, 10 percent food (compared with about 65/35 coff ee/ food at the fi rst store). Mark Forman had a somewhat similar experience with his two coff ee shops. He opened his fi rst River Road Coff eehouse in Granville, Ohio, in 2003. Th e second one, in Newark, about six miles away, opened in December 2006. Th e Granville store is in a converted Victorian farmhouse that retains its homey feel, while Forman describes the Newark store as "more like a Starbucks," with brick-and-glass architecture. Th e Newark store, unlike the Granville one, has a drive-thru, which infl uenced the menu off erings. "We had to kind of think about kind of products we sold [at the fi rst store] that were highly visual and impulsive that would be much harder to do when your business is disproportionately coming through the drive-thru," Forman says. THE RIGHT DISTANCE Th e two stores turned out to be just the right distance apart, Forman says: "We wanted to do [the second store] close enough so that it wouldn't stretch too much, and we wanted to do something diff erent enough so that it would allow us to experiment and try some new things." Th e proximity was close enough to allow the goodwill from the fi rst store to have an eff ect: "If it hadn't been for our closeness and our reputation, and the fact that we had our [fi rst store's] customers who shop over in Newark able to stop by for the fi rst few months, I think it would have been a lot tougher for us to have made it." Location is one of the biggest considerations in opening up a second store. Th e goal is to put the second store close enough to the fi rst to benefi t from name recognition, but not so close that it will cannibalize sales. Unfortunately, there are no hard-and- fast rules on this; it depends on variables like demographics, traffi c fl ow, the similarities and diff erences between the fi rst and second stores, and many others. In Forman's case, the second store hit that sweet spot. "People don't seem to live and work in each other's territories, so we didn't really worry much about that," he says. Valente says he wanted to open his second store relatively close to the fi rst to benefi t from its identity. "I knew I had to overlap my territory because we needed a little recognition," he says. "We're a small place, still." Brad Barber, owner of Cabin Coff ee Co., put his fi rst store in Clear Lake, Iowa about nine years ago, and his second, in Mason City, about eight miles away, a year and a half later. "We did have an experience to where we did lose a few customers from the Clear Lake store to the Mason City store because it was closer for them," Barber says. "But we still had an increase in our sales in our Clear Lake store that same year we opened up Mason City." It helped that the two towns have distinctly diff erent customer bases: Clear Lake is a resort town whose population doubles in the summer, while Mason City, with a larger population, is a major northern Iowa shopping hub. DEDICATION Sometimes a potential location's population amounts to almost a captive audience. Locating a store inside a dedicated space, like an offi ce or institutional building, can be a good March 2012 • www.specialty-coffee.com | 13