At Londinium we donâ t just sell you the coffee and leave you to your own devices. We have a vested interest in ensuring that our coffees are prepared in the optimum manner. In essence, whatâ s good for your business is good for ours. At the commencement of the relationship we will send our engineer out to ensure your equipment is in good working order, both machine and grinder. We will then send out our trainer to train your staff in the Londinium way of coffee preparation. Finally, we will monitor your coffee throughout our relationship to ensure the quality remains consistently high.
Finally, it is important to understand what you are selling. You are not selling coffee. You are in the entertainment business. Think of yourselves as having more in common with a health spa than a supermarket. Image is everything. You are trying to create an oasis of calm in one of the worldâ s largest cities, or you are trying to create a cutting edge place to see and be seen. Or you are trying to create a hang out for artistic types to mingle, or a place for business people to grab a moment of sanity out of the confines of the office cubicle. It doesnâ t matter what your target market is, but you need to have identified it and taken all steps possible to meet their needs to a greater extent than any of your competitors in the local vicinity. This is what makes a successful coffee retailer. A scruffy place, with a tired shabby interior, and not cleaned until it shines on a daily basis is not going to make the grade. However the rewards for those who are genuinely committed to providing their target market with all they desire are significant. It all comes back to the concept of perceived value. If you are perceived as offering value by your target market you will succeed.
Another common mistake is a lack of design. If you donâ t feel confident in this area you need to acquire expert help. Perception is everything in retail. You must create a mood that meets the needs of your target audience. This might require a significant investment, but it is a key contributor in the likelihood of your success. Once you have created this environment you need to acquire staff who know how to serve. You are in the entertainment/service industry, your customers are coming to be entertained, to feel good about themselves, to step away from the hum drum for a moment. If you can achieve this for your target market you will succeed.
There are other factors that have a strong influence on your success to, such as location. Retailing success is largely a function of footfall, or the density of pedestrian traffic. Without this you can expect to struggle. That said, some retailers develop such compelling retail experiences that people travel considerable distances to go there, although this is stacking the odds of success against you and you can generally expect to have to survive a much longer period of time before your target customers learn of your existence and get in the habit of making a special trip to see you. The primary driver for such a strategy is if you consider the rent in prime retail locations to simply be too great, in which case you might be able to identify a niche location in an area with much lower footfall. Successful examples that come to mind for a café might be near a school, petrol station, gym, beauty salon, hairdresser or other facility that your target customers are already in the habit of making regular visits to.
Get in touch with Londinium today. We have the experience to help make your coffee retailing venture a success.