She also buys into the Craft Beer Cellar way of doing business. The idea of finding help to run the business was very appealing to us, especially the right kind of help like the expertise Marla provides.” But we’re all about grass roots, and we didn’t want a corporatized Craft Beer Cellar. “I’d be lying if I said no company has come to us and offered to buy a percentage of the brand. “We brought Marla on around the time small breweries started selling out to investment companies,” Schalow says. She’s been a friend of Schalow’s for nearly two decades, and her background in the education industry has helped expand Craft Beer Cellar’s educational programs. Most of the stores are owned by franchisees, despite the fact that just two years ago Schalow “had no idea what the word ‘franchise’ meant outside of a sports context.” There are 24 Craft Beer Cellar locations nationally, with 12 more in the works.īoth founders knew they couldn’t go through an expansion alone, which is when Marla Yarid-De La Cruz came on board as a partner about a year ago. Today there are 24 Craft Beer Cellar locations from Maine to California, with 12 more in the planning stages. “Somewhere in the midst of it all we decided to open a second store, and then we started to wonder how big we could grow.” “All we intended from the beginning was to open one store,” Schalow says. Now we just want to carry amazing products, and we don’t care who makes them.” Expanding the Family “In 2013 we started rethinking that and having conversations internally. “We refused to carry products from the large brewers for the first few years,” Schalow says. Belmont, in the Cambridge area, has a reputation as a hard place to do business, but that’s not the case in my experience – the town has been amazing to us.”Īt first, Craft Beer Cellar was adamant about not carrying mainstream brands because the owners didn’t want to financially support conglomerates in any way, but that position has softened over the years. “However, as we looked at different towns, we realized this was the perfect place to open a beer store. “There were a million reasons not to open it here, because we live here and everyone knows us and it was very risky,” Schalow says. But for us it wasn’t working hard, it was just working like we always had.”īoth women were also weary initially about opening the store in their hometown of Belmont. No one wants to work that hard – and I get that, since most liquor store owners don’t come from the restaurant business. I told her the number-one reason is margins. “There were certainly some that I want to pay homage to, as people who came before us, but only a handful around the country. “Kate asked me why there weren’t a lot of beer stores around,” Schalow says. Her background is in culinary arts and she’d worked in the back of the house in the restaurant business for her entire career. The first Craft Beer Cellar opened in Belmont, Massachusetts in 2010, after Schalow and Baker left the restaurant business to strike out on their own.īaker was initially skeptical of the idea of opening a beer store. Capturing their heart and their mind ultimately leads to the trust to capture their wallet.” An Idea Sparks Often it’s about a family, or a history, or a set of ingredients – and if it’s worth telling the customers will listen. The same can be said for the brewers we work with – we know their story and we’re able to share it with customers. “Knowing customers’ names and their stories is so important. “Hospitality is all about saying thank you and making someone feel welcome,” Baker says. Both spent the early part of their career in the restaurant business, and attribute their success in retailing to the training they received in the hospitality industry. That’s certainly true for Kate Baker and Suzanne Schalow, two of the owners of Craft Beer Cellar, a national chain of franchised beer stores. For many beverage retailers, off-premise success started with on-premise experience.
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