Читать книгу Wake Up and Sell the Coffee! - Martyn Dawes - Страница 25

I engaged with Alldays and Spar once more and sent them a glossy presentation under the heading of ‘The country’s first true self-service gourmet coffee concession’. I set out the journey we had been on to develop coffee in their stores and what I had learnt.

I explained how there just weren’t enough reasons to buy what we had been selling. Table-top instant coffee machines were commonplace in offices. We needed to create an experience, some degree of theatre and a destination. People were going to plan to visit a store for a Coffee Nation coffee in the future. They bought my vision and we identified four stores between the two companies from which the instant machines would be removed and replaced with the new offer.

The first was our original location in Faversham. My in-store unit had a back-lit menu panel to tell people what types of coffee drink were available. I had some menu cards produced for customers to take away and designed some branded loyalty cards. We trained the staff on-site how to clean the machine and look after the fresh milk.

The gamble paid off. Almost from day one we were outselling the old Nescafé offer, even though the price was 10p more per cup. Within weeks we were averaging 160 cups per week per machine against 85 per week with Nescafé. No promotions, no free doughnut offer, just great coffee and sales volumes were up 90%.

Of course, I couldn’t do all of this and spend nothing. My overdraft had now exceeded its limit and I could see a disaster looming. I finally had my proof but I was out of cash.