I own a Houseplant Café, where you can sip coffee while you shop for houseplants and small handmade items, think jewelry, pottery, candles etc. We’ve been open six months and things are going not as well as we’d hoped. Demographic: millennial women, brunch crowd (I can break this down further) Area: 12k cars pass us a day, we do have road signage and a flag Returning customers: 17% of our clients visit more than once a month Offerings: locally roasted coffee, lattes, smoothies, sandwiches, fresh pastries
I have a marketing background, but I’ve been out of the game a bit and so I feel like I’m not living up to the needs of the business. We do post daily on social media. Have a following of over 5k between insta and FB, starting on Tiktok next week. We need to nearly double our daily numbers to get to the profits we estimated before we opened. We do theme days that are very popular but then the rest of the week is under $500 days. I have a small marketing budget of about $1000 a month which I’m not sure where to utilize. Help? I’m getting desperate for my space to succeed.
You are trying to do too many things and your coffee sucks.
Switch to a good roaster ie Sightglass or Coava and learn to do a good job of making it and you can build a loyal coffee customer base.
Yep. Honestly this is most likely the issue. Do you love coffee?? Do the baristas love coffee? Do you know the difference between an average coffee and a great brew?
We may be trying to do too many things, but our coffee is recieved very well, locally roasted, and people drive to us because we serve it. (The roaster has a large following with three of their own cafés) Every time someone comes to us specifically for the coffee, they comment on how it tastes exactly like it should-- we train our baristas extensively and yes they do love coffee.