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.
Dive into your books and look at what brings the most money in the door: the shopping or the coffee/sandwiches? Pick a business. Are you a plant shop that offers coffee to entice customers through the door, or are you a coffee shop with a few plants for sale in your under used space?
Second: what takes up the most square footage? Your display and shopping items, your seating space, your kitchen/prep space, some 4th thing? Looking at your books, does it make sense to devote that large/small portion of your limited square footage to each aspect?
Third: after you dive into your books, and it turns out you’re a coffee shop first and foremost, do you have any way to track those customers’ behavior? Do they browse? Do they sit and chat? Do they immediately leave after getting their coffee? Do you need to try and shift your customer’s behavior more? For example, do the customers that browse spend more time in the shop and spend more money than the ones that sit and hang out? Does it seem like the people that take a seat end up camping out for too long without spending more money? Look into your customer’s behaviors and motivations and lean into it.
Finally, my own personal opinion: novelty coffee shops that devote more space to shopping compared with seating always seem to struggle. They do well with foot traffic, especially tourist traffic during big tourist weekends or holidays, but don’t seem to do well with locals. They have trouble with consistent revenue, especially on weekdays, because people (especially locals) don’t go in to these types or shops just to grab a quick coffee or to meet up with a friend. Locals will come in for an “experience” such as a themed day or an event, but they won’t regularly go in for their morning cup of joe.
Do you find that certain days are slower than others? You mentioned weekdays are slow. Are they so slow that it doesn’t make sense to turn up the heat and have an employee present? If it makes sense from an employee retention standpoint, you might consider only being open Thursday through Sunday or something like that.