Harris & Smith Coffee Company began as a coffee catering company in 2015 and opened up a full brick and mortar coffee shop and retail store in 2017. They graciously answered some questions about their business to share with the Seller Community as our first in the "Get to Know Inspiring Sellers" series.
What is the best piece of business advice you've received?
An imperfect marketing plan/product/service is better than none. Even if your product packaging isn't perfect, or the advertising and branding isn't quite how you envision it, having an active plan and regularly engaging with your customers is the most important factor in whether your business succeeds.
How do you stay current/competitive as a business?
We block off time each day for research. This includes reading business forums & facebook groups, tracking down interesting influencers on instagram and other social media, and looking at our own data in Square. We also read and respond to all reviews on Google, Tripadvisor, Yelp, and Facebook. This is extremely time-consuming but keeps our business profiles active and current!
What Square products do you use?
We use the Square Stand, and the Square reader for our pop-up booths at events. We also use both the Loyalty and Marketing programs.
Where do you get ideas to bring in more customers/clients?
We are located in a tiny town near the U.S./Mexico border in Arizona and we have two primary customer groups. The first is locals, who live here year round. As a result, we work really hard to maintain good relationships with our daily local customers through the Square loyalty program and special promotions.
The second group is tourists going to the beaches in Mexico. We are working to tap into the travel economy more and more through looking at what others in the tourism industry do to advertise: hotels, restaurants, and visitors centers. One of our recent projects has been to order inexpensive rack cards and drop them off at all the travel stops, hotels, and visitors centers that would take them in about a 70-mile radius from our shop. The rack cards have a coupon so that we can track how many of our new customers find us through these travel stops.
How did you find out about the Seller Community? Do you have any suggestions for how to improve it?
We found the Seller Community through looking up information about Square-compatible about barcode scanners, which we hope to add to our shop soon for better tracking and selling of our retail items! The Seller Community is very helpful to us, but many of the forums are technical forums about how to troubleshoot or set up Square systems. It would be really great to see more forums about how other businesses are using Square to increase sales, and to learn about different ways to increase customer frequency using the loyalty program.
Thank you to Taylor and Harris & Smith Coffee Co.!
