Opportunity: Have you ever gone to
lunch with a friend at a café and by the time you’ve gotten done telling a
story, your once hot food has become cold and is no longer appealing to eat?
Are you tired of walking into cafes and noticing that they’re just like the
ones down the block?
I’m targeting two opportunities in cafes:
how food is eaten and the atmosphere that you eat your food in.
I’m a long-winded storyteller who could
easily spend an hour eating a sandwich that would take any other person fifteen
minutes. I’ve found that when I go to lunch with other people, I end up with
cold food or melted ice cream way more often than I do if I’m eating by myself.
While the nature of the opportunity is small, only affecting a small percentage
of people, there is a long window of opportunity because I don’t think café
owners are looking at their customers experience after receiving their food. Cafes
today, in my opinion, are focused on providing the food and drinks people want
at reasonable prices but they aren’t doing anything to distinguish their café
from the competition, except for maybe a small difference in price. The cafes
I’ve visited all present the same generic atmosphere and I want to do something
different.
I’ve found these problems to be more
prominent in cafes located in college towns because I feel as though they were
designed for the “on the go” students, as well as the general population.
Gainesville, in my opinion, has an unfulfilled market for small cozy cafes
where people can spend long stretches of time.
Innovation: Through the series of
assignments I’ve created an incrementally innovative solution to the problems
identified above. The goal is to take a traditional café and provide an in
store experience unlike any other while creating a unique twist. I want to
create a café that serves everything in mugs in order to not only have food
maintain its temperature better but to also use mugs as a basis in developing a
cozy atmosphere. My solution is an incremental solution because I’m not making
any major changes to how cafes operate, only how the food is served. What I’ve
come to realize over my years of eating meals out of mugs is that the food that
I have eaten out of mugs generally retains its temperature longer, which I think
is because when food is in a mug, instead of on a plate, less of the food is
exposed to the air and the decreased surface area means that it takes longer
for the food to be affected by the temperature in the room.
Revenue will come from the sale of food
and drinks. In one round of costumer interviews I determined that people generally
only visit cafes to buy drinks so it stands to reason that drink sales will
comprise the majority of my revenue and also serve as one of the main elements
that will draw people into the doors. I don’t currently know the price that I
will be able to sell my food and drinks for because it will depend on who my
suppliers are and what price I can buy my inputs for. Ideally I would like to
set the prices at a rate that makes Mugged competitive with other cafes in the
area.
Venture Concept: By serving
everything in mugs, food will retain its temperature longer and as a result
allow people to eat their food slower and maintain a conversation with their
friends without the worry of their food becoming unappealing too quickly. I
personally find the use of mugs to be a cozy experience; just the act of
wrapping your hands around a hot mug puts me in a better mood.
I expect that the aspect of my café that
will draw people in, will be the atmosphere that will be created because there
isn’t currently any cafes that I’m aware of that provide a cozy small town
atmosphere. My small employee base will help to reinforce my ideal atmosphere
by creating the organizational culture I discussed in a previous post. If my
café is established in a prime location than it will likely make customers more
inclined to visit my café since a majority of people tend to visit the most
convenient café. My competition is the large array of currently established
cafes in the Gainesville area. If my main focus is college aged students than
Starbucks would be my largest competition simply because they are located on
campus and are therefore the most convenient café for most people. In order to
make myself the most competitive I can, I need to have my prices in the same
ballpark as other successful cafes and be in an easily accessible location to
draw in potential costumers.
As mentioned in a previous post, http://cxgoss.blogspot.com/2016/03/my-unfair-advantage.html,
my greatest advantage is that I want to create an organizational culture that
fosters a relationship between costumers and employees. By having this goal in
mind when initially developing my idea, it allows me to tailor my café to
support my ideal culture more easily than someone who already has a functioning
café.
As I discussed in the Amazon Whisperer
assignment, http://cxgoss.blogspot.com/2016/03/amazon-whisperer.html,
I’m not totally sure what direction I want the café to move towards once it’s
established. I’ve entertained the idea of adding a to-go option as a way to
increase the number of potential customers, by targeting people on the go, but
worry that they wont get to experience what my café is really offering.
Assuming I launched this café, in five
years I hope to still run Mugged by surviving the difficult first couple years.
Long term, I have no interest in making Mugged a chain coffee shop or
franchising because I feel that if we did expand we would loose some of
elements that I’m currently working to achieve. I just hope to continue to
improve the menu and the experience.
