We spent a lot of the time looking through the Charlie Lovett, “Roaster, Baker, Sandwich Maker”, café brand. Conveniently, there was a Charlie Lovett on George Street next to our Hotel and while waiting for Gidon (Global Franchise partners) to pick us up we sampled the coffee and Charlie Lovett experience. 

The coffee was superb and the staff interaction with the customers gave us a good feeling about the suitability for the NZ market. The ordering staff takes your name and then the Barista will tell you that he/she is making your coffee next and it won’t be long. A simple but very effective way to interact with the customers. The George Street site is the company’s oldest, but is nicely situated near the Central Train station and 2 Universities, and there was a real flow of customers.

We then went out to the Head Office which is another implementation of their concept stores. Situated in an industrial area, the café/roast house is in a Warehouse unit conversion. This café has fast become a destination for the local community; so popular in fact, that they will soon be opening for dinner as well. All Charlie Lovett sites roast their own beans and bake their own bread and bakery items on-site, which adds a beautiful aroma and theatre to the experience.

Later that afternoon we also visited Charlie Lovett in the café strip in Cronulla. This is a recently opened site with over 30 other café’s on the strip. Despite the competition, Charlie Lovett has quickly become a fixture with the locals due to their friendly customer interaction and excellent coffee knowledge. Another income stream to the CL business is the wholesale bean sales. Due to the fact that all CL stores roast their own beans, they are able to build a local wholesale business around their location. In the Cronulla site they are now selling beans to a number of the other non-branded cafés on the strip, one of which has had a blend created by CL’s Master Roaster for their exclusive use.

While at the Cronulla site, we were able to sample a great Woodfire Pizza, which is also part of the Charlie Lovett story. The brand has been created around the Google search of the word ‘woodfire’. With over 40,000 hits per month, the owners created a brand around URL woodfire.com and its derivatives, which now provides great exposure for anyone searching for woodfired pizzas. They spent 12 months devising a pizza base and new oven concept, and are now rolling it out as part of the CL brand. This way franchisees can be open for breakfast and lunch, roast beans for retail and wholesale, and if they choose, be open to sell gourmet pizzas in the afternoon/evening. This is maximising the use of their plant & equipment and site rental. An interesting fact is that there are already 4000 Google hits per month here in NZ looking for Woodfire!

We also visited a traditional CL café and there we met a very interesting Marketing guru called John Dwyer. John is famous in Australia for being able to convince Jerry Seinfeld to agree to do an advertising campaign for a small Australian Building Society. Why? Because John asked him and no Australian ever has asked Jerry before! John has been involved in marketing consultancy for over 30 years (http://theinstituteofwow.com/) with pretty much every big Australian brand, and we believe we convinced him to come to NZ to share some of his incredible knowledge. We will be looking to setup some invitation only events early this year.

One of John’s current marketing ideas is the “Fuel for Less” campaign, see here. One of the great marketing strategies is the Fuel discounts offered by the Supermarkets to keep their customers loyal to their brand. The Supermarkets generally give away a 4c per litre discount once you spend a certain amount of money. John’s system will make this available to Mum and Pop and SME businesses throughout NZ.  But they won’t be offering 4c, the minimum will be 10c and maximum will be 50c per litre. This marketing strategy is simple to setup, easy to use for the client and ensures clients will continue purchasing in order to continue getting the fuel discounts. Being a marketing strategy that ensures client loyalty, there will be exclusivity on category/geography, so first in first served. We will be working to get this to the market here in NZ in the next month or so.

GFP are bringing new ideas to the market all the time so make sure you keep coming back to our site because we will be adding new opportunities all the time.