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or the last year and half I have been working on a business plan and I am now turning to you, my fellow beer lovers to tell me if you believe this concept would be both beneficial to you and to beer consumers here in the US.
Please check out my website and let me know what you think.
Thanks a bunch.
Rick
www.brewtopiastore.com
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No, I wont check that out.
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you’ve been working on a business plan for 18 months and only then ponder if there’s actually a market for your product?
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Well, it’s one thing to have a plan, it’s another thing to build a store. The site seems to talk about things that should be done, and things that you want to do, but I didn’t see any sales stats for an actual bricks and morter store. The site looks well laid out, but if it was me, I wouldn’t jump into attaching a store to a brand/franchise that doesn’t even exist yet. I’m fairly conservative by nature though, so maybe I’m in the minority. I think until you prove that your concept works, you’ll have a hard time getting people who want to pay you franchise fees without any evidence that your franchise is viable.
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You might want to put some time into developing your page design, or perhaps hire a professional. Your iWeb page has all sorts of problems with tables and divs, and after it fully loads, alot of the text and images go blank or overlap.
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That is strange. It worked fine when I pulled it up...maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about but the site is great.
I think he is marketing a product that would be good for the craft beer market. The problem with stuff like this is that much of the draw to the craft beer side of things is in the niche market feeling that it has. Once things get too professional looking it’s over for lots of folks who would rather the business be more of a cottage industry.
Certainly the hardest thing about doing something like this with a specialty artisan product involves not shooting yourself in the foot and killing the soul of the product like the Macros. This is possible though but difficult as the perception of non beer drinkers is that beer is for the masses and not anything remotely close in quality to wine, which actually survives just as much on how it is perceived as a product as it does on the quality of the product itself.
These two things I’ve mentioned will be your biggest hurdles: Not being so main stream that you lose the real bread and butter of craft beer industry...folks on this site. And drawing people from the outside into a market that is perceived as slightly adolescent or blue collar.
As you can tell, to make money people usually end up doing one or the others of these. Drawing them together is the challenge. Hope you can fill the gap.
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hey anything that supports good beer in this country is good with me. with that said, the concept seems unique but i have no problem finding plenty of stores with 800 or 1000+ brews in them and plenty of selection both on the upscale side and the more common micros. and just for the record i live in ct. a state that is one of the worst for beer. i don’t believe anyone would pay franchise fees for a brand name without any recognition and it would take you opening a few successfully before it took.
good luck with it....... just my 2 cents.....
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So your trying to open a chain of beer stores? Where, exactly, is the "newness" of this concept? Of course, your web page doesn’t actually give any real info, so I may be way off here.
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I don’t know about anyone else but it crashed my computer.
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Actually I had my doubts until I saw Flag Football mentioned...
All good beer shops are welcome, but since Illinois is excluded from your plans (no drinkers here in Chicago, I guess), all I can say is "Good Luck."
But you should do something with your site. I had no overlapping as reported above, but it did the slowest scrolling that I’d witnessed in years.
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Thanks for the feedback guys.
I live in out West where we have a great bunch of fantastic microbreweries but these products are almost never in the supermarket and the gourmet beer stores feature some but they’re inconvenient and expensive.
I actually already have my first 2 prospective franchisees lined up and have raised about half the capital I need to build the prototype store. We should be under construction in late Spring.
A few years ago I helped start a pizza chain here in Boise that had such a professional and slick appearance that within 2 hours of opening the doors on day 1 we had 3 people wanting to know if it was a franchise and if its not then how do I become a franchisee? This taught me a very valuable lesson. If you’re opening a business and your goal is to do more than just create a place for you to work then you better have a plan for growth.
Last year a new beer store opened up in the Seattle area and made the trip over to talk with the owners about their experiences. At that time they had been open for about 6 months and they had been visited by people from as far away as Calgary, Florida and NY wanting to see how they did it. This tells me that there is a huge potential for franchising this concept so there is no shortage of people who are passionate about beer and would like to turn that passion into a business.
I understand the challenge mentioned about making the store overly commercial and potentially alienating the craft beer purist so let me assure you, the goal of the store is to convert more people to the purist philosophy by doing tastings, home brewing contest and other events designed to expose people to the many different facets of beer.
With that being said though, the biggest downfall of so many beer stores is they slant too far to one side or the other. Either they’re a glorified C store selling 18 packs of macro crap or their beer snobs that alienate the average consumer and thus slowly die on the vine because they have no volume. There has to be a balance if you’re going to make it last and make any money.
Brewtopia will carry a wide variety of imports, specialty beers and of course micro and craft beers but we will also carry the macro brands because without them you can’t generate the volume needed to sustain an operation. I realize that most of you are gasping right now and calling me a heretic but its those macros that get them in the door to be exposed to the rest of the world of beer, thats why we offer free tastings of everything in the store.
Starbucks has been labeled a sell out because they’ve commercialized the coffee bar but without Starbucks 90% of americans would still be drinking Sanka or C store coffee and I see Brewtopia the same way. The success of Brewtopia makes the success of your neighborhood beer market possible. This is about beervangelism, spread the word.
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