Picking a Location, and Announcing Ours.
Good morning, I'm drinking Gao Wen Black Tea at home, listening to the new album by Parannoul, who are a great South Korean shoegaze band. I just went and saw our new sign above the building one more time to grab photos for Today's post. In the daytime it has our two main colors, a dark blue outline with an peach fill. I think they look great, and at night they're backlit to be a bright white with a blue outline. Some people were reading the sign on the front door when we pulled up which was also super cool to see.
Our shop is in Mandarin, 12200 San Jose Blvd Suite 18, Jacksonville FL 32223
you can get there in at most 30 minutes from anywhere in the city
Let's talk about why it's there, and what I looked for in a location.
I started by creating a map of every coffee shop in Jacksonville. Unfortunately I don't have it here for reference, but I'm sure it's out of date by now anyways. I was looking for minimal, if any, nearby specialty cafes, and areas that had roads that weren't all major highways. I thought I'd be able to just browse city feet and pick a location, but that felt like I was working backwards when the area was so important.
I began to drive through and get a feel for the areas, deciding if this was some place I would want to drive to grab coffee, or spend most of my time in once I started working there. I was looking for nearby grocery stores, restaurants, parks, community events etc. I stuck to Jacksonville because that's where I lived, and I didn't want to displace myself along with my partner while also looking to start a business.
I settled on Mandarin because it seemed to check all the boxes
What I found was, it had state parks, baseball and soccer fields. It had a farmers market, a Trader Joe's and Whole Foods, it had major chains and everything was strung together by San Jose Blvd which is medium speed road with beautiful overhead trees. Something else I noticed was a ton of McDonalds's, Dunkins, and Starbucks's nearby but not any specialty coffee. To me that said there was a place for it.
Our closest neighbor would be Twisted Compass, and now Brass Tacks opening over the bridge in Fruit Cove, which was announced after I'd already signed a lease. To me those are still pretty much in another area, most of our competitors that weren't chains would be 5+ miles away. I think it's stupid to worry about your competition before yourself, but it's also stupid to pretend you have no competition.
So finding a building
This is going to sound silly but the first thing I looked for was a place facing east. Having natural sunlight in the morning is super important, and of the few places available in Mandarin, many of them faced west or had a large overhang that blocked out the sun. I would ask to tour in the morning or afternoon.
That said, I spent months just contacting leasing agents and companies to try and tour places. A lot of buildings had been empty for a long time, or had landlords who don't live in this city or state that were difficult to get ahold of. It got to a point where I was going on LinkedIn to try calling the personal numbers of people listed on the building. I started searching in late March and didn't actually sign a lease until July, to give you an idea of that time frame.
Go Big or Go Small?
All I wanted was an empty building so I could put in a bathroom and a bar top. This was actually pretty hard to find. Most of the buildings were twice the size I needed and required a ton of demolition work or modifications just to simplify them because they used to be restaurants or stores with lots of partition (non load bearing) walls. I was thinking I wanted a 1200 sq/ft building, but realistically when it was all gutted I needed about half that. So I started going small, and it was still crazy the price variation I found in Mandarin.
Buildings near each other that all basically had the same quality of interior at 800-1200sq/ft were renting anywhere from $1200-$3500+ a month. At one point I just had to leave a meeting because the price I was given was so much higher than I anticipated. I was going to completely remodel anyways, so I picked a small place that had seen better days, deciding that saving the money on rent would be worth the construction costs.
At that point things started to feel real, and it wasn't too much more work to sign. We've had this building for about two months now and while we haven't gone far with construction, we're on the way.
Thanks for reading,
- Elias
