I can probably look up the value of the market for take away coffee and write some statty-sounding blurb about how much profit is made on a single cup. The fact is selling coffee makes loads of cash – if you can get customers to buy it given the Starbucks and Cafe Nero on each corner.
Facts, themes and sentiments:
- To make a cup of coffee is quick and cheap.
- To wait for a cup of coffee in a queue is annoying.
- To be a member of a club feels cool.
- To support small business is cool.
The idea is as follows:
Create a coffee shop chain where each shop has two counters, catering for two tiers of clientele;
Counter 1
- Customers buy coffee like in any other coffee shop (queue for it, choose it, pay for it, wait for it, leave with it or, sit and drink it)
Counter 2
- The second counter will be for “club” customers only.
- These customers pay a monthly membership fee and can have as much coffee as they like.
- A single, “coffee-of-the-month”, selected from artisan roasters, is served in the normal formats of -pressos and -chinos.
How can you afford to give coffee away for free?
To make the coffee is cheap and the membership fee will work on the same principal as a “eat-as-much-as-you can” pricing model in that the average person will drink much less coffee than he initially thought he would, leaving you with a profit.
The following should happen.
- Your members will form an online community of coffee aficionados. They will discuss and star-rate the coffee of the month.
- Your website should become synonymous with great quality coffee, produced by independent producers.
- You then sell the featured coffees online with customer ratings automatically driving the best coffees to the top of the pile.
- The whole concept should grow itself as long as you are actually serving good coffee.
- In effect, you are using your club as a market research collective and as advertisers – both elements that can be expensive and not always accurate in the traditional format.
“Nice-to-haves”
- A fair share of regular. club customers will drink coffee at the same place every day. Not wanting to wait, they can have a mobile app to pre-order coffee so that it is ready just before they arrive. The details of such an app will need to be worked out but I cannot see how this should be too difficult.
- All things coffee related can be booked or bought online e.g., barista courses.
Having grown up in a very small town in South Africa, living in London is the equivalent of trying to buy toothpaste in a very big supermarket – the wide range of choice can leave you just standing there for 15 minutes, staring at tubes full of multi-coloured floride.
He says of London, “It took me quite a while to adjust to the pace of this magnificent city. But, I do owe London a lot when it comes to shaping certain ideas. For now, when it comes to my blog, I feel a butterfly of excitement tickling in my stomach at the idea of putting ideas and stories in public space and seeing what might become of them.”
