Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Beans & Barley Update
Dear Beans & Barley Shop Customers,
We have been opened for almost a year and a half now and have had some ups and downs throughout our journey and without a doubt enjoyed the whole process of building up a business from scratch, especially if it's a speciality shop selling some unusual products from around the world. We’ve had some difficult times with management & finding the products that are likely to sell etc. and it has proven to be very difficult with such speciality products. As you may already know, a lot of the products that we sell have very short best before dates due to not containing preservatives or other useless ingredients that you would usually get in supermarket food. This has resulted in large amounts of wastage since we’ve opened and coming up to a year and a half we have had to re-consider the whole idea/concept of the business and look closely into our finances.
We are stuck for ideas to find a solution as to what can be done to prevent losses within the business. We have tried increasing sales, as some of you may have realised we’ve added fruit & veg, ice creams, additional range, but it hasn’t helped, we have had to raise our prices to compensate for the wastage, which again hasn’t helped, the only option left for us was to reduce the range to a bare minimum which will result in less customers and in turn less sales which won’t help either. Therefore, we have decided that having a retail premises is not financially viable no matter what we try to do and have had to make a very difficult decision to discontinue the retail side of the business.
We believe that by discontinuing the retail section of the business we will give the cafe more of a chance to progress by focusing solely on the cafe and being more creative with what we do. We will make Beans & Barley a much more mum/baby friendly environment, we will use some of the current retail space to create a play area for the kids, our walls will be used for art exhibitions and we will have comfortable sofas scattered around. We will be opening later than usual (especially on weekends) with nibbles and some great wines & draught beers and we will be running weekly classes such as salsa. During the day we will have workshops that will include some of Paul’s speciality subjects, coffee cupping sessions as well as some kids activities such as drawing classes etc. We apologise in advance if we are causing any body inconvenience with this decision but it's not something we have chosen to do, it's something we have had to do.
We will not be buying in any new stock as we need to clear out what we have in stock, also our scaffold shelving will be up for grabs once they are empty along with some of our equipment.
Again, we apologise for any inconvenience caused but it gives us a chance to be more creative with the large space we have.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Beans & Barley on
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Thanks Hugh.
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Permalink Reply by Alice Mezzo on
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Good luck with the changes. We look forward to enjoying the new space!
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Thanks Alice, hope to see you soon..
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Permalink Reply by Peter on
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Just a thought...
perhaps you could keep a small range of items such as wines, oils, vinegars, canned goods, pastas etc that have long shelf lives. I've seen cafes, delis do this? may help
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Hi Peter, this is one of the ideas floating in our head. We may eventually have stuff like this but we would like to focus on the cafe first and then move onto a deli style place. We would like to have fresh olives, cheeses and other essentials for sale but as I said, once we have stabilized the cafe side of the business. Thanks for the suggestion mate...
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Permalink Reply by Nicky Gunter on
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Well done on making such a tricky decision. I think it sounds really positive, and I agree with the above in that may be you should consider keeping a few bits with long shelf life. Even the eco cleaning and beauty products? Something different from both Blend & H. Local Store
Looking forward to seeing the end result!
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Hi Nicky, as I mentioned above, we would most likely have deli style products on sale once we have done the hard part of setting up the whole premises. Surely Harringay Local Store would stock some of the stuff that we currently stock, I will be speaking to Paul and Ebony to advise what our best sellers are so that they could maybe stock them, that makes our job easier and the guys at HLS busier :) then everyones happy
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Permalink Reply by Sarah on
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Oh that's a lovely idea. Yes it's the household stuff that HLS don't sell that I've been coming in for.
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Permalink Reply by sparkle on
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Hmm. The thing is, my feeling is you still don't have a USP and am not sure you've hit it with this? When you opened originally it was duplicating shops already really close by you which was puzzling and didn't make me want to shop or visit really although i gave it a try occasionally.
Adjacent we already have Blend, and Jam and the Local Store. Blend caters really well for the mum community and I appreciate their personable friendly vibe - i'm sure it's not easy for them either but they have ideas and they keep it fresh.
Jam has it's own feel and unique music venue thing going on. For me Local store have a great edit on products i buy to supplement things i get from online shop, fantastic wine and are a reliable place i can get interesting products and yes- local stuff.
To be truly honest i'm a bit concerned actually what you want to do is copy Blend and maybe attempt draw away some of their sizeable portion of baby/parent visitors.. and yes my bias in saying that is i'm a loyal Blend customer. (and actually of all the other venues mentioned apart from - sadly for you- beans & barley)
I don't wish you ill in any way but it would be nice to see you branch out into something different maybe?
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