Opportunity: Are you tired of
walking into cafes and noticing that they’re just like the ones down the block?
Do you ever wish there was a café that had a small town feel for you to escape
to during your busy day?
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
and while eating out of a mug might not scientifically be proven to maintain my
food’s internal temperature longer, it has led me to discover a unique approach
to eating my meals. Although 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.
From the group of
people that I interviewed and also received feedback from, I’ve determined that
a to-go option might be beneficial to my café depending on where I open my café
and what type of demographic the population is comprised of. From my feedback,
I realized that I couldn’t claim that hot food served in my café will remain
warmer longer just because it’s being served in mugs. To fix this I added a
small disclaimer stating that while there is no scientific evidence to prove
what I’m doing, I have personally experienced the effects of eating out of
mugs.
