When the chain breaks!

Back at St. Aloysius college, during my sixth form days, I was roped into the ‘Young Enterprise’ project and spent many weekends in a basement together with my friends painting wooden hearts, which eventually were strung together to make a family tree which you could hang on your wall.

The company was called ‘Chez Nous’ needless to say we didn’t get close to the winning race, apparently people didn’t need their family names written on wooden hearts hanging off their walls, but they did need wine racks by ‘Wined Up’ and jack in the boxes by ‘Omicron’ who eventually won the competition!

Before then I had no idea how important it was to create an original yet useful idea but also how important it was to market it. To hype up your brand and make people want to own one of your creations no matter what.

Stories of young energetic entrepreneurs who start off with a little village dream, which soon becomes a global sensation. These are hardly your average ‘Young Enterprise’ stories. They are the hard work and perseverance of people who believe in their product, and a marketing guru’s involvement at the right place and the right time!

What do you get when you cross an English teacher, a history teacher and a writer with Howard Schultz?......... The biggest coffee house franchise in the world. In 1983 Starbucks opened as a coffee house, not just selling coffee beans as was planned by these three men ; but selling, lattes, expressos, macchiatos and a myriad of other products. Schultz was convinced that saving the trouble of people roasting the beans themselves at home was the formula. If they just prepared a beverage that would tickle the mass’s taste buds and sell it in an attractive package then that would be an instant success. In the 1990s Starbucks opened a new store every working day, resulting to 16,226 stores worldwide.

All you need is something that people will go crazy for! Starbucks has the likes of Britney sipping one of those jumbo sized Frappucinos on the cover of every tabloid mag; on her infamous trip to the hairdressers, the medulla was staring back at us, a milk moustache was visible whilst she left the shopping mall… with that sort of free advertising the owners are laughing all the way to the bank.

Pity about the recession though! It has caused too many of those monstrous chains make their staff redundant and shut their doors forever. Britain’s ‘Woolworths’ left a nation shocked at the announcements of the stores closing, being sold to other chains and their hefty debts with share holders.

So I guess it’s not enough to have thought up an idea back in 1909, but you have to really keep at it, keep a regular influx of clientele and keep a very close eye on your finances. You just never know when that chain is ready to break!