Beverage Dynamics

Beverage Dynamics July-August 2016

Beverage Dynamics is the largest national business magazine devoted exclusively to the needs of off-premise beverage alcohol retailers, from single liquor stores to big box chains, through coverage of the latest trends in wine, beer and spirits.

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16 Beverage Dynamics • July/August 2016 www.beveragedynamics.com [ RETAIL PROFILE ] AN IDEA SPARKS The fi rst Craft Beer Cellar opened in Belmont, Massachusetts in 2010, after Schalow and Baker left the restaurant business to strike out on their own. "It was all happenstance – none of this was planned," Schalow recalls. "You get to be around forty and decide, 'I really need to work for myself.' When you work for other people, the creativity that happens when you're on the clock stays with them, and I aspired to something greater than that." Baker was initially skeptical of the idea of opening a beer store. Her background is in culinary arts and she'd worked in the back of the house in the restaurant business for her entire career. "Kate asked me why there weren't a lot of beer stores around," Schalow says. "There were certainly some that I want to pay homage to, as people who came before us, but only a handful around the country. I told her the number-one reason is margins. No one wants to work that hard – and I get that, since most liquor store owners don't come from the restaurant business. But for us it wasn't working hard, it was just working like we always had." Both women were also weary initially about opening the store in their hometown of Belmont. "There were a million reasons not to open it here, because we live here and everyone knows us and it was very risky," Scha- low says. "However, as we looked at different towns, we realized this was the perfect place to open a beer store. Belmont, in the Cambridge area, has a reputation as a hard place to do business, but that's not the case in my experience – the town has been amazing to us." At fi rst, Craft Beer Cellar was adamant about not carrying mainstream brands because the owners didn't want to fi nancially support conglomerates in any way, but that position has soft- ened over the years. "We refused to carry products from the large brewers for the fi rst few years," Schalow says. "In 2013 we started rethinking that and having conversations internally. Now we just want to carry amazing products, and we don't care who makes them." EXPANDING THE FAMILY "All we intended from the beginning was to open one store," Schalow says. "Somewhere in the midst of it all we decided to open a second store, and then we started to wonder how big we could grow." Today there are 24 Craft Beer Cellar locations from Maine to California, with 12 more in the planning stages. Most of the stores are owned by franchisees, despite the fact that just two years ago Schalow "had no idea what the word 'franchise' meant outside of a sports context." Both founders knew they couldn't go through an expansion alone, which is when Marla Yarid-De La Cruz came on board as a partner about a year ago. She's been a friend of Schalow's for nearly two decades, and her background in the education indus- try has helped expand Craft Beer Cellar's educational programs. "We brought Marla on around the time small breweries started selling out to investment companies," Schalow says. "I'd be lying if I said no company has come to us and offered to buy a percentage of the brand. But we're all about grass roots, and we didn't want a corporatized Craft Beer Cellar. The idea of fi nding help to run the business was very appealing to us, especially the right kind of help like the expertise Marla provides." She also buys into the Craft Beer Cellar way of doing business. "We're particular and have very high standards, both for the liquid we carry in the stores and the people we bring into our family" Yarid-De La Cruz says. "We want to do the right thing for brewers, distributors, customers and each other. We've dedi- cated our lives to this business and we're very proud of it." The Belmont store features 800 SKUs of beer. There are 24 Craft Beer Cellar locations nationally, with 12 more in the works.

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