“You can have a strong brand but still be locally sensitive.”
Apicbase CEO Carl Jacobs asked Daniel Spinath, the founder of Crêpeaffaire, how he grew the brand and successfully entered the international market with a niche product: crêpes.
From a single location in downtown London to 30 stores across the UK and the Middle East, Daniel aims to grow the business to 300 locations and operate various distribution channels worldwide.
He reveals how they built and franchised Crêpeaffaire:
📋 Adapt your menu: “60-70% of our product line is the same everywhere. Consumer tastes are universal, but where a different eating culture exists, you must make adjustments.”
👏 Build relevance. “Be relevant as you can be, not just with your main product, but also with peripheral products that match the main concept. In our case it was coffee. It’s great driver for business.”
🤲 Create a unifying theme. “We have a very clear and strong brand identity. You see that in our color coding and our furniture.”
🧪 Experiment. “Once you have your first store up and running, turn it into a laboratory and make lots of trial and error. You’ll learn a great deal from it.”
✋ Delegate. “When you start to go national or start franchising, you need to start delegating and have systems in place.”
🎯 Focus. “Our CEO is focused on the present, and I’m focused on the future. This allows us to work on what’s important now and anticipate things that will be important in the future.”
👂 Involve your staff: “When implementing new technology, make sure staff understands, tests, questions, challenges, and sees the advantages for it and their customers.”
🚶 Walk the talk: “Once we demonstrate that something works for us, then we can demonstrate that it will work for our franchisees. We need to set the example.”
🙋 Build confidence. “We listen to our franchise partners to understand their challenges. We don’t just impose things on them. For example, we don’t insist that they use certain technology if it only benefits us and not them.”
🤝 Collaborate: “You can’t do everything by yourself, so you need to build a win-win relationship. We have a strong brand identity, solid systems, products, and operational knowledge. Our partners have the local knowledge, cultural skills and real estate.”
👍 Be upfront: “The key to a strong franchising relationship is to be very upfront right from the beginning as to what the expectations are for both parties.”
💡 Innovate: “We’re moving to a new era where we’re looking more and more into simplifying certain things. We’re looking at consistency and speed without compromising quality.”
💖 Remain passionate: “I’ve always loved crepes. I sincerely believe that you can only be an entrepreneur if you have a passion for the product.”
👉 Catch Daniel Spinath on the 2nd episode of Apicbase’s podcast, the #FoodServiceGrowthShow.
Watch the episode now: https://get.apicbase.com/podcast-episode-2/
