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.
The sign is the biggest we’re allowed to have on the pylon, it’s new, black and white, we did miss a few months with it because of other movement in the strip, so I do hope it changes things for us. We projected 50 on weekdays and 100 on weekends. Weekends we hit typically 125, and we do graph everything, we are seeing growth but not exponential. I wanted to post this now knowing we’re going into the holidays and try to have it shoot up this month. We have about 200 parking spots, I’d say 40 are located right in front of our shop. Really trying to increase weekdays! Thanks!
“….we are seeing growth but not exponential.”
Unless you give away $20K or $30K worth of merchandise or services over first month or two, it’s rare for small retail outlet to experience exponential growth at launch.
If you have reached 50 percent of projections by third to sixth month of operations, I’d say you are doing pretty well.
Think about how store grows organically.
In beginning, every customer is new customer. Here, business volume is primarily a function of the store’s customer attraction rate (i.e. capture rate of pass-by traffic).
Over time, consumers become more familiar and sales volume increasingly becomes more a function of customer loyalty rate and store attraction rate less so. Ideally, customers visit more frequently and spend more per visit.
It takes some time to build relationships and trust with customers and for a business to mature.