Читать книгу Wake Up and Sell the Coffee! - Martyn Dawes - Страница 41

As we progressed into the autumn, plans were coming together for the launch of our trials. There was to be one machine with Texaco in Clerkenwell, London, and two with Welcome Break, one at Oxford services on the M40 motorway in the petrol forecourt shop, where we would replace two Kenco machines, and one in the retail shop at Warwick Services also on the M40.

Clerkenwell Road opened on 27 October 1999. We had been furnished with sales data from the previous Nescafé instant coffee machine that Texaco had operated at that forecourt. The results were astonishing. Within one month of launch:

 Weekly drink sales volumes were up 56% to around 500 cups per week.

 Cash sales were up by 260% to £558 per week.

 Profit for Texaco was up by 19% to £139 per week.

We had increased the selling price from 55p to £1.20. It’s funny now to think of how cautious I was of increasing the drink price when few coffee drinks are available for less than double that price today. This was the power of timing in a new business; customers were ready to pay more, they just needed someone to come up with a reason for them to do so.

Scott and I virtually lived at Clerkenwell Road; I spent an entire weekend there to witness customer behaviour. It was a great site to launch with. The legendary nightclub Turnmills was virtually opposite and the store traded around the clock so it was a real baptism of fire for our operating model. We sold quite a lot of coffee in the early hours to some pretty wasted customers, but it all worked. While there, Scott and I could never resist the temptation to go up and clean the shelf of sticky stirrers and napkins! One customer even told us what she thought:

“I walked past, thought what the bloody hell is that – I’ve just got to have a coffee – beautiful coffee, beautiful machine!”

Within a few weeks we had anecdotal evidence we were bringing more people into the store. I asked one customer why he hadn’t gone to the very contemporary Benugo cafe at the end of the road. He replied that he can’t get coffee, a newspaper and a sandwich there, but he could now at Texaco.

A few weeks after opening in Texaco we launched our two Welcome Break locations. The results were just as strong. Versus the previous Kenco offer in the Oxford Services forecourt shop we increased Welcome Break’s profits by 15%, actually exceeding what they previously took in cash. At Warwick we were quickly generating some £900 per week in revenue where they hadn’t even sold coffee before. We were clocking up 2400 drinks sold per week from these three machines. Given the results we didn’t waste a minute in seeking to clarify the position of both retailers. We wanted a commitment to roll-out from both.

In less than eight weeks from launch Texaco wrote to us confirming they would commit to a further 15 London locations for Coffee Nation. The retail director of Welcome Break wrote: “Following successful trials we intend to roll-out to as many sites in our network as commercially viable.” They believed they could identify 40 locations to start with. This gave us a combined commitment for 55 installations from two large companies.