Unlike Starbucks, Blue Bottle Coffee is committed to a niche market.

For professional baristas, please follow the coffee workshop (Wechat official account cafe_style)

The leader of the global coffee chain is Starbucks (feature Reading). If you want to beat Ta, it is only now to start to copy Ta to take the route, development will only have no way to go; perhaps, find another way to dig deep into the niche market, take a different boutique coffee route from Starbucks, is the best choice. However, the disadvantage of running a cafe in this way is that it is difficult to scale, and it is even more difficult to become a chain kingdom like Starbucks.

Recently, however, Blue Bottle Coffee, a coffee shop starting from a niche market, has successfully launched a new generation of coffee revolution. In a short period of ten years, it has burned all over the United States, entered Japan, and is expected to set up shop in Chinese Taipei in the future. It can be described as the most successful case of commercialization and large-scale operation of handmade cafes. Not only that, both the founders of Twitter and Instagram want to invest a lot of money in Ta!

What is the difference between Ta and the traditional coffee shop chain? What is the difference between a maverick coffee shop and a maverick coffee shop? How does the "dark horse" emerged in this "coffee wave" shape its own brand value and business model?

Master the voice of zealots

At Blue Bottle Coffee, what customers drink is not a cup of Starbucks "assembly line products", but cups of "soulful" coffee that are carefully selected, roasted and carefully brewed by professional baristas.

Unlike the emotionless modern coffee-making model in which coffee chains put mixed coffee beans into a coffee machine, Blue Bottle Coffee cooks a "single variety of coffee beans" in hand-brewed mode. The characteristic of hand-brewed coffee is that it does not pick coffee beans at all, no matter which variety of coffee beans can taste its unique aroma and taste.

Not only that, Blue Bottle Coffee only sells organic coffee beans that are freshly baked within 48 hours and must be discarded if they are not used for more than 48 hours; the expensive coffee machine is still in use today. The coffee provided by employees through manual brewing and ice droplets, which is both labor-consuming and time-consuming, has a taste unmatched by a general chain of coffee shops. Blue Bottle Coffee brand tenet is: would rather let guests wait a few more minutes, rather than sacrifice the multi-level taste of coffee!

Of course, not every consumer knows coffee and can tell the subtle difference between coffee and coffee, but Blue Bottle Coffee targets a small group of people who have a special preference for coffee taste, and thus establishes a style that is different from other coffee brands. At the same time, every process and every product service of the brand tells that they attach importance to quality and adhere to the spirit of love for coffee, which awakens the hearts of many people who are restricted by the rules and regulations.

Not to make every product loved by everyone, of course, it has its development risk. However, when you focus on making the best of your products or services and choose to please only enthusiasts in a certain field and make them fall in love with your brand, you can rely on them to shake up the market.

It's not just "space".

At present, Blue Bottle Coffee has 38 stores. With stores all over Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo, Japan, it can be said that it has opened a fire, and it plans to enter Taiwan next year. However, Blue Bottle Coffee does not want to be a coffee shop that follows the trend, but a coffee shop that sets a precedent. In addition to the fact that the boutique coffee culture has been successfully rooted in the hearts of the people, its spatial aesthetics is also amazing.

Blue Bottle Coffee has a good choice of locations, choosing places with stories or styles such as old factories, old warehouses, opera houses and art museums. Each cafe is in line with the style of the community, has a unique soul, and makes each shop look like a work of art since its birth.

Not only that, the design of each store is cold and windy, displaying a series of hand-brewed coffee utensils with an open sense of space and a simple design. And all the designs are sending a message to customers: this is not an ordinary coffee chain, but a place to return to the nature of coffee and focus on making a good cup of coffee.

Starbucks wanted to create a "third space" that was neither the workplace nor the home, but ended up becoming a low-cost office for freelancers. Within Blue Bottle Coffee, there are no discounted items and no wireless network. The model adopted by the brand is: enjoy your drink and leave. Brand founders don't want you to be intimate with your computer, or even to facilitate communication with other customers. He wants you to talk to the barista. What we're talking about is coffee.

In recent years, Blue Bottle Coffee is not only regarded as a coffee brand, but also defined as a life aesthetics brand and a technology company. The brand adds a shared office function space similar to We Work, which completes an effective extension of the "coffee" scene. Unlike other creators such as We Work and WeWork, Blue Bottle Coffee still sells its own brand products in this space. The closest thing to this model in China is "3W Coffee" and "Garage Coffee". The brilliance of Blue Bottle is that while the space is given new connotation, the coffee in the store has long been branded with the soul of the brand itself.

Ta has done more than you think.

Contrary to the wholesale distribution of beans by other major coffee chains, Blue Bottle's core business focuses on the sale of artisanal coffee and coffee utensils in retail stores, a model of high investment in exchange for high returns.

As the brand has its own personality and gets bigger and bigger, Blue Bottle Coffee is no longer satisfied that its small blue bottles appear only on coffee paper cups and takeout bags. The brand began to sell the raw coffee beans used directly in the cafe, with a label on each bag to know the variety, origin and fair trade certification of the coffee beans.

In addition to selling boutique coffee, Blue Bottle Coffee also does a lot of work on coffee-related merchandise. Every time a new product is launched, it will bring its own hot spots, which will attract high popularity attention. "apart from selling coffee, we do more than you think," says Blue Bottle Coffee.

In addition to coffee beans, matching utensils are also important. The avant-garde coffee maker Moka Pot, as well as travel coffee equipment launched in cooperation with Timbuk2, and other utensils. These coffee utensils give coffee enthusiasts more reasons to be "crazy". At the same time, consumers can also buy books published by Blue Bottle Coffee on how to make coffee.

In addition, in January 2017, Blue Bottle Coffee teamed up with the well-known chocolate brand TCHO to create a new chocolate brand "Mokaccino", which attracted wide attention as soon as it was launched.

Not only that, Blue Bottle Coffee often collaborates with local artists and craftsmen to develop local culture and style. The "Support Local" series inspired by the blue bottle hopes to create a warm world through the skillful hands of craftsmen and pass on the inner poetry to everyone.

Every time Blue Bottle Coffee develops a new variety of coffee or surrounding products, it will bring its own hot spots and cause hot topics. It is precisely because of its attention to details, technological innovation and the grasp of the pain points of market consumption, which is why customers like this mysterious blue bottle.

Dickens said that this is not only the best of times, but also the worst of times. The same applies to entrepreneurs in the catering industry. Especially in an era when consumers have the right to speak, consumption escalates and minority groups begin to rise. Grasp this group of people, is the best times; if it is blindly cater to the majority of people, only know how to follow the trend and follow the crowd, the brand will not operate its own character and tone. And this is the worst of times.