Richard,
I’ll post more of the process when I get some time to organize my files a bit.
My hours are all over the place right now, but if you give me enough warning I can try and be there. Juggling that, design work, kids and wife starting a new advertising job right now
We were actually looking in the west end initially, particularly in the King and Spadina area but space was hard to find and the rents were outrageous, the after pub crowd was exactly what we had in mind. However, my business partner and I both live in Riverdale, we kind of stumbled upon our current location and got a killer deal on the rent so we thought we’d try it out. To be honest we’re glad we did it there… living near by makes it easy going back and forth, we both still have regular jobs so juggling everything is easier when it’s just down the road.
Yes, Store No.2, very aggressive we know but there is a demand for it so we want to fill it as soon as we can.
Eventually we want to get into places like Kingston, Waterloo, Halifax even. The rents are cheaper and we feel we can attract quite a bit of attention because of peoples fascination with bacon.
In reply to LMO about the “bacon wave”… our store was never about jumping on that bandwagon as we never really saw it as such. Coming from the UK bacon sandwiches are part of everyday life, you can buy them at any greasy spoon. In Toronto there is a stall at St Lawrence Market that sells peameal bacon sandwiches (apparently it’s a tourist thing to do here) and have been for the last 30 odd years… we figured we could give people another option and elevate the quality of the ingredients to appeal to a different income class of customer who would be prepared to pay a little bit more for better quality local ingredients.
In all honesty we are trying to avoid getting sucked into the kitschy aspect of bacon… we’re not selling Baconator sandwiches 