Wānaka coffee kiosk Alleyway celebrated its community of loyal customers for its third birthday last Friday, handing out free coffees in exchange for birthday cards. The cafe is owned and run by the team behind General Service, the Pembroke Mall workspace which houses the kiosk, and while it might look like a bonus feature of the office space, for the business’s owners, its been a blessing. Sam Baker, the graphic designer behind Vacation Studio and one of the five original owners of General Service, said that slow adoption of the workspace made the development of an in-house hospitality offer a necessity. "We started this as a co-working space, but we underestimated how many butts you need to put on seats to turn over rent. "We’d rented out the kiosk to another cafe, but that meant there was a ceiling on the amount we could generate from it, and no-one was using the workspace, so we’d hit our limit in terms of what we could bring in,” Mr Baker said. The General Service team needed to capitalise on the space with an in-house offer, but as “five boys who didn’t have a clue”, as Mr Baker tells it, the proposition probably wasn’t going to be very good. Enter Brooke Connell. Ms Connell is Mr Baker’s partner, and in the midst of a mid-20s crisis stepped away from her own career in graphic design to return to her roots in hospitality. Spotting an opportunity, Ms Connell and her friend Natalie Thiele pitched their concept to General Service. "I always wanted to own my own coffee shop, and Nat always wanted to make sandwiches,” Ms Connell said. The master plan involved good coffee and a focused menu — doing a few things and doing them well — and with General Service looking for a new economic platform for the space, Ms Connell and Ms Thiele came on board as shareholders. The menu — typically built around five or six sandwiches made in-house with fresh, local ingredients — changes regularly to give returning customers the chance to try something new, but popular demand means two sandwiches could become permanent features. "We get to a point where we’re fed up of eating something, so we’ll change the menu, but then all of a sudden you’ll get a load of people up in arms saying ‘bring back the herby chicken’,” Mr Baker said. "We took the pastrami off once and it was the biggest mistake we ever made,” Ms Connell said. Asked about the success of the business, Mr Baker said that it had slowly become successful with word of mouth bringing in new customers, and seasonal visitors — such as the ski crowd — beginning to come back year after year. Ms Connell has a different answer. "We been successful from the start,” Ms Connell said. "For us success is measured by community, so even though it’s great that the cafe is getting busier, we’ve built such a cool community of people, and epic and happy staff, which is more important than anything else.” And Ms Connell is happy to put her money where her mouth is when it comes to community building around her business. Last winter, Alleyway ran a community event called Good Morning Sunshine, with $1 coffees between 7am and 8am every Friday. "The only rule was that you couldn’t have your coffee to go, so you could sit down and connect with people. "It’s so easy to stay in bed when its cold outside but it was so cool to see everyone making the effort to come down for a coffee in the dark,” Ms Connell said. Alleyway’s third birthday was a continuation of the theme, with the cafe giving away free coffees in exchange for birthday cards. [Missing Credit]Alleyway's community of customers gathered to celebrate the cafe's third birthday. Photo: Ruairi O'Shea Ms Connell said they received around 40 cards, many of them handmade, featuring lovely messages and even poetry. “I heard one card maker telling our staff that coming to get a coffee here is the best part of their day. "I think people forget that in hospitality you have the chance to make someone’s day better, and that’s the whole ethos of Alleyway,” Ms Connell said. ruairi.oshea@alliedmedia.co.nz
