Seesaw Cafe says it wants to be China's "boutique Starbucks"

I don't know why so many foreigners like to post photos of drinking coffee on Seesaw (including selfies) on Instagram, or how the Seesaw team was chosen to be the only case team in Evernote Enterprise. Before Curiosity Daily interviewed Seesaw, all we knew was that since its opening in 2012, the coffee shop had expanded in Jiangsu and Zhejiang at a rate of six stores in three years. This speed is certainly nothing compared to Starbucks, but in the boutique coffee industry, which has always been a problem in scale, this speed still surprises many people. In February, the flagship store in Shanghai's K11 Shopping Mall also opened, with an open kitchen, twice the size of Yuyuan Road and by far the largest.

Tom, one of the founders of the open kitchen at Seesaw's flagship store in Shanghai K11 Shopping Mall, made no secret of their ambitions in an interview with Curiosity Daily. "now everyone is talking about the concept of boutique coffee, and we are mainly promoting Australian boutique coffee." Many Australians come to Seesaw and will say that the smell evokes the smell of their hometown. When chatting with our employees, we often joke that we should strive to be the boutique Starbucks of China. "

Workbench in Seesaw store

Curiosity Daily: when was Seesaw founded, and what is its current size and staffing structure?

Cai Yuanyuan, marketing director of Seesaw: on April 15, 2012, Seesaw opened its first store, that is, Yuyuan Road Store. In two years, we have six stores, and the new store in K11 Shopping Art Center has also opened. This is our flagship store, which is 200 square meters and twice the size of Yuyuan Road store. After the trial operation, we will cooperate with the mall to carry out a series of coffee-themed activities in March. We also have a shop in Yiwu, Zhejiang, because Yiwu is the hometown of the boss (laugh …) .

Seesaw is now a team of nearly fifty people. Although the sparrow has all the five organs. There are two founders, one of whom is Sally (CEO) and the other is Tom. In addition, there are marketing department, course consultant (responsible for the course arrangement of "Coffee Dream Factory"), Ministry of Commerce and Trade (taking care of the business on Taobao), baking room (baking beans, we supply beans for more than 100 coffee shops), product department (new product development), operation department (responsible for in-store operation), design department (graphic design, storefront design, etc.), finance department, human resources department and so on. The two founders have a clear division of labor: Sally is responsible for financial and overall planning, Tony is responsible for the development of new markets, such as the location of new stores, and so on.

Curiosity Daily: can the clerk have free coffee?

Cai: the clerk has two free cups of coffee a day.

Curiosity Daily: how is the storefront design of Yuyuan Road store completed?

Cai: this store was designed by a French designer. He happened to be working upstairs at that time. It was a coincidence. After discussion, we chose the light American industrial style.

Curiosity Daily: could you describe your business in one sentence?

Cai: seesaw is still ambitious. We usually joke that our business is to do "boutique Starbucks".

Founder Tom: the realization is that everyone is talking about boutique coffee. In fact, to a large extent, "boutique" is also a slogan promoted by many coffee shops.

Cai: this is the era of the so-called "third wave of boutique coffee." the first wave of coffee was instant coffee in World War I, which was for soldiers to drink and boost morale; the second wave of coffee was represented by Starbucks and began to pay attention to the quality and taste of coffee; now it is the third wave, that is, there are many small coffee shops with personality. The so-called "boutique coffee" does not have a clear definition, but the American Fine Coffee Association has a standard and SCAA scoring system, which refers to coffee with more than 80 points as boutique coffee.

We offer different kinds of coffee in these stores in Shanghai. For example, in the Yuyuan Road store, we mainly offer two kinds of beans: Colombian single Italian style and a mix called "hummingbird". The Ruo store offers a matching called giraffe because different stores have different customers. There are more white-collar workers in Rui'o store, they like more traditional flavors, and Yuyuan Road store sometimes offers some new things with personality.

Now Seesaw is mainly doing several things, one is the coffee shop, we continue to research, develop and bake new coffee beans. In addition to various coffee stores, Seesaw has also opened a platform to delve into and promote boutique coffee called Seesaw Coffee Dream Factory, which is a platform for coffee knowledge sharing and coffee professional skills training. You can register through the Internet to learn coffee knowledge, divided into primary, advanced, etc., as well as special flower drawing training courses. In addition, we also retail the cups around the coffee and so on. The cups sold are of the same style as those in our store. They have a low breakage rate and are suitable for flower drawing. We went to find them specially.

Tom: the Yuyuan store now sells 150-200 cups of coffee a day, doubling that at the end of the week. We calculated that selling 50 cups a day would keep the store running for a day. The operation of a coffee shop can be seen in six months. At present, we only make coffee, desserts and bread. We have special suppliers, but we don't make them ourselves. In our first year as a coffee shop, we actually opened three stores, but two of them closed down. The first one that closed down was that we wanted to make take-out coffee. We only rented a very small store with only 4 square meters, which could not be maintained later. The second store was opened in a small commercial standard for white-collar workers, and white-collar workers were at work during the day. I went to the bar after work, and opened in those places, the location is very problematic. The worst part was that only one cup was sold in a day, and then we had more experience in choosing the location of the store.

Curiosity Daily: why do so many foreigners like you? How do they know about you?

Tom: it's hard for us to answer that either. So far we have hardly spent any money on promotion.

Cai: I think there are still a few aspects. The first aspect is our online and offline activities. Before the store opened, our Weibo followers accumulated to 2,000 or 3,000. Now, although there are only 20,000 to 30,000 followers, they have gathered among people in many industries and accumulated attention before opening the store. In addition, we hold many offline activities, such as flower drawing competitions, which will invite internationally famous baristas. Maybe this is the reason why foreigners know us. In addition, a lot of people will post our photos on Instagram, and most importantly, we mainly play Australian coffee. There is only one Starbucks in Melbourne. Australians love their own coffee, and many Australians come to Seesaw to say that the smell reminds them of their hometown.

Curiosity Daily: if you were asked to answer, "if not at that time. This business can't be done. "what would you say?

Cai: I've been working for this company for two years, and if I were asked to answer this question, it would be "if it hadn't been for the two bosses' trip to Yunnan at that time, there would have been no Seesaw." At that time, when the two of them traveled to Yunnan, they saw the coffee bean planting park. It could be said that they first came into contact with the upper reaches of the whole chain and decided to do it.

Curiosity Daily: what kind of people are diners?

Cai: people from all kinds of industries, creative people, freelancers and managers are in the majority. The age is concentrated between 20 and 35 years old.

Curiosity Daily: what would you do if you didn't do the current business?

Cai: open a shop. Guitar training class, which has always been a dream.

Tom: maybe it's an architecture firm! Before I started a coffee shop, I almost went to work as an architecture firm.

Curiosity Daily: what do you think your industry looks like? What are the characteristics?

Cai: the coffee industry is still in its infancy, but it is also growing rapidly. it is really a very young industry. Coffee is an industry with a low threshold but a really long chain, and now we are constantly integrating the whole chain to stabilize it.

Curiosity Daily: among the companies that provide similar services to you, what do you like the least about them? (it can be about products, it can be about industry rules)

Cai: I don't like it. Maybe it's just that some people in the same industry will compare picky to our coffee taste.

Curiosity Daily: which coffee shops in Shanghai do you usually pay attention to?

Cai: yes, I will pay attention to it. For example, Mingqian Coffee, Mellon Coffee and so on, are in the same industry.

Curiosity Daily: where did the name Seesaw come from?

Cai: Seesaw itself means seesaw, which means to find a balance in the dynamic. It represents our understanding of coffee. It is hoped that Seesaw can skillfully integrate the taste of every kind of beans from different producing areas, and really achieve the balance of sweet, sour, bitter and mellow aroma.

Curiosity Daily: what do you think is the most difficult thing when Seesaw is growing up? Why?

Tom: manage people, really. The children of Seesaw have a lot of personality, and then we will recruit a specialist from the personnel department, responsible for salary calculation and so on, and gradually establish a reasonable system. For startups, people are really important.

Curiosity Daily: recommend a cool company!

Cai: I personally recommend bluebottle. This is a very favorite coffee shop, they originated in San Francisco, is a boutique coffee shop, famous for baking fresh organic coffee beans.

Curiosity Daily: people who like your products, what brand will they use?

Cai: New balance,Nike... Let's go with these brands. Personally, I prefer MUJI.

Tom: I will pay attention to some independent designer brands, Scandinavian and Japanese brands are more.

Curiosity Daily: if your company turns out to be so successful that it will affect people's way of life, what do you think it might be?

Cai: I really hope that drinking coffee can become people's daily habit. Now we are very happy to see someone ordering coffee takeout. I hope you can regard drinking coffee as common as drinking cola. In the past, people always thought that coffee should find a place to sit down and drink it slowly. If there is any change, I think Seesaw wants to popularize more coffee spirit for people.

Curiosity Daily: tell me about the cooperation with Evernote!

Cai: our colleagues work in different places. We must have a channel to communicate and share quickly. The emergence of the enterprise version of impression notes is very timely. Solved a lot of practical problems for us. It also makes people like to share more. In a corporate notebook called Seesaw Public, people actively share their coffee translation articles, their understanding of coffee work, including questions that they want you to think about together. There are fewer and fewer meetings, and a lot of work can be solved without meetings.

As for the cooperation with Evernote, at that time, an employee of Evernote liked Seesaw very much and made a special trip from Beijing to recommend us to our Evernote colleagues when he got back. Later, they launched an enterprise version of shared case, and we participated. There were a lot of screenshots in that case, which were taken directly from my mobile phone.

Seesaw's different stores and products

(curiosity Daily Shi Yu)