Have you lost the game of selling yourself or going out of business? It is all caused by excessive expansion and loose joining.

Like a sparkling fireworks, Korean coffee poured into China with the trend of Korean stars, suddenly brilliant, then dim. In June this year, coffee accompany you was exposed because the capital chain broke or will sell Kopi Luwak.

After coffee accompany you (caffebene), another Korean coffee company has encountered a situation. The rise and fall of Korean coffee has attracted the attention of the industry from the popularity of the market to the sharp decline of Korean coffee.

According to most views, Korean coffee has come to this stage mainly because of its rapid expansion and loose joining, which leads to out of control of management.

After coffee accompany you (caffebene), another Korean coffee company has encountered a situation. It is reported that the Zoo Coffee SOHO Modern City store in the zoo near Dawang Road in Beijing is closed.

This is a franchise store of zoo coffee, the person in charge said, "the closure of this store is mainly due to some problems in the rent and service quality of the house."

Zoo Coffee interior decoration

It's Korean coffee and there's something wrong with the franchisee. Coffee with you (caffebene), Zoo Coffee (Zoo Coffee) and Maan Coffee Coffee (Maan Coffee) are the "big three" of Korean coffee in recent years.

The reason for the decline of a brand is not simply to expand too fast. This is in fact a systemic problem, with problems in brand, management, supply chain and even business model.

Some people in the coffee industry even believe that Korean coffee is not a coffee shop in the strict sense, but an innovative form of catering. The situation of Korean coffee is very similar to the Shangdao coffee that was popular in the Chinese market many years ago. Also because of franchisee management problems, also in the name of "coffee" in the name of Chinese food, in the end as bleak as fireworks.

Can they really be called coffee shops?

Said a general manager of a coffee chain. But looking at Korean coffee, we find that its food proportion is quite high, and even some franchisees sell spaghetti, pizza, salad and other foods to dilute the atmosphere of the coffee shop.

A catering expert once wrote that the internal operation of Korean coffee represented by Man Coffee is only a typical Chinese restaurant model. Let's excerpt some paragraphs from this article to illustrate:

1 lack of standardization and process that chain cafes should have. For example, beverage production is still in the original stage of "every cup should be weighed electronically", and there is no perfect process, so there is often a saying that "overflowing coffee is slow" in customer comments. 2 the degree of dependence on employees is too high, and the labor intensity of employees is too high. and there is no sound employee management and incentive system. "I work six days a week, I work about ten hours a day, and I often have to work shifts after only five hours of sleep, not to mention overtime pay!" This basically reflects the current situation of employees in China's catering industry; 3 it is easy to be copied. Nowadays, imitating diffuse coffee can be seen everywhere in major cities in China, and even the original imitating object coffee accompanies you, there are stores that completely copy the decoration style of diffuse coffee. 4 although under the name of a coffee shop, in fact, the standard of making coffee is very backward. People with a little coffee expertise can feel that the fancy coffee mixed with milk is very poor, and the foam is usually very rough. Although Man Coffee claims to insist on using only home-baked beans with a shelf life of only one month, such insistence is often just a flamboyant gimmick, which often leads to franchisees far away from Beijing. They all have to pay expensive air freight.

(2) the mode of big stores and the disadvantages of joining individual stores.

No matter whether Korean coffee can be called a "professional" coffee shop or not, from its business model alone, there are also mistakes in its big store management model and single store joining strategy.

Compared with Starbucks, Pacific, Costa and other coffee chains, most Korean coffee stores are relatively large, ranging from hundreds of square meters to thousands of square meters. There are two drawbacks in the big store model, one is the high rental cost, the other is the difficulty of operation.

Pacific Coffee

Take the Zoo Coffee Jianwai SOHO store mentioned at the beginning of this article as an example, its operator said that the closure of the store was related to the rise in rent. Pacific Coffee CEO Lanyi once said in an interview with me that from the average level of the industry, the coffee shop with an area of 150m2 is the most efficient coffee shop.

"150 square meters is the more appropriate area for a coffee chain. On the one hand, the rent pressure is not too great; on the other hand, it is easier to control from the perspective of creating a coffee shop atmosphere, "Lan Yi said.

High operating costs are another drawback of the coffee shop model. "the scale of thousands of square meters, a large number of employees and exorbitant logistics costs all nail down the ultra-high operating costs of each store of Man Coffee, and almost every store needs a basically full occupancy rate in order to achieve a level of balance of payments. This is accompanied by a high degree of investment risk." The above-mentioned catering experts said.

The management distortion caused by the single-store joining mode has also become a major reason for the final "out of shape" of Korean coffee. Joining a single store means that it can not form a scale effect, which leads to the high cost of the supply chain. Franchisees either give up the supply chain channels provided by coffee brand headquarters and find their own way out (resulting in a decline in quality). Or bear the high cost of the supply chain and endure the loss of profits.

Starbucks

We look at Starbucks, Costa and other mature coffee chain brand franchise system. They are open to join in the regional market, and most of the franchisees are local enterprises with strength.

The advantage of joining a region is that, first, franchisees take down an area at once, whether it is to build a supply chain or build a management structure or expand brands, they all have the advantage of scale; second, most of the franchisees are powerful local enterprises. compared with individual "self-employed", they can bear more risks and are not profitable in the short term, and the store operation is more standardized and systematic.

Korean coffee franchisees are mostly individual investors. On the one hand, they have higher expectations for short-term profits; on the other hand, they are less able to withstand losses in the face of stores. This is also the reason why Korean coffee franchisees frequently run away.

"the success rate of a mature coffee chain system is 70%, 80%. For regional franchisees with enterprises as the main body, opening more than a dozen stores at a time, even if some of them are unsuccessful, are generally within a controllable range. For a single store to join the self-employed, a store is all of him, due to location, market and other external reasons to open a shop is not successful, which will become a burden he can not bear. The general manager of the coffee chain said.

(3) the neglected background of coffee shop operation

Before the troops move, the food and forage comes first. Looking at a coffee chain brand, we tend to pay more attention to the customer experience shown at the front desk, such as environment, atmosphere, coffee quality, service level and so on. But what is easy to ignore is the backstage efforts to achieve the customer experience at the front desk.

A coffee bean, from variety, origin to baking skills, to grinding particle size and finally to the process of blending, and even the temperature and thickness of the coffee cup, every slight change will affect the quality of the coffee. For coffee shop regulars, these details determine whether a cup of coffee is successful or not, and that's why he pays for it.

The lesson of Korean coffee is that you can no longer simply think that coffee shops sell only the environment.

Yes, for coffee shops, the environment is an important factor affecting their experience, but for the Chinese market, which has been trained by Starbucks for more than a decade, people's appreciation of coffee is also growing day by day. The quality of the product itself will also become a very important indicator.

Operating a coffee chain brand, its operation management, service standards, supply chain level and even IT system and other background forces can not be ignored. For some individual franchisees, what is often lacking is the strength of the background.

Once a coffee shop backstage system can not keep up, gradually its passenger flow will decline, and sales will continue to decline.

In order to save the flow of customers, the operator's thinking was greatly inspired by adding a lunch today, a dessert tomorrow, and some cocktails the day after tomorrow. Gradually, the store, which is defined as a cafe, began to deform and degenerated into a catering business.

Source: retail with the third eye