The office building, where employees of BCR, Deloitte and Ericsson work, has several coffee shops on the ground floor among which Fitto Cafe and Starbucks, as well as a McDonald’s restaurant.
“We want to cover all key points in the city with Brioche Doree,” says Philippe Besadoux, general manager of the Kenvelo group, which includes five fashion brands with 90 stores, as well as the Brioche Doree coffee shop brand.
The company wants to have coffee shops in Piata Victoriei, Piata Universitatii and Piata Romana and in the most important shopping centers of Bucharest. It chose to open a shop in America House because of the traffic from the nearby office buildings during weekdays and in the weekend and its competitors are already there, Besadoux added.
Other future Brioche Doree locations are AFI Palace Cotroceni, Bucuresti Mall, Plaza Romania, Brasov, Coresi and ParkLake, the executive said. The company is looking for street front space in Piata Romana and Piata Universitatii areas, after having opened shops in the Stejarii residential club, in AFI Palace Ploiesti and in Sun Plaza (this particular coffee shop was acquired from the former franchisee that did not expand).
Opening a coffee shop takes EUR100,000 to EUR150,000 depending on the floor space and yearly revenue stands at EUR250,000 to EUR700,000, as Besadoux has previously said.
Brioche Doree’s main rival in the Piata Victoriei area, Starbucks, is seeing about EUR500,000 revenue a year, according to ZF estimates.
The French executive chose Piata Victoriei for the first street front Brioche Doree because the area has become a hub of restaurants and coffee shops in recent years.
With total revenue of EUR7 million to EUR10 million a year, the almost 20 restaurants and coffee shops are competing over the 20,000 people working in the office buildings in Piata Victoriei and the passersby.
More than 2,200 people relocated to this area in 2013 alone, including employees of Huawei, Hidroelectrica, Cegeka (IT), and the European Fund Ministry.
However, Brioche Doree is the third tenant in that location in two years, after City Grill and Haagen Dazs. City Grill closed up shop there in early 2013 and was replaced by Haagen Dazs, an ice cream and coffee shop of Costas Kapetanopoulos, former marketing and communication manager of Cosmote in Romania.
The executive turned entrepreneur says he wants to relocate the shop in Piata Victoriei to a shopping center, because having a parking lot available helps.
The main problem of the area (Piata Victoriei) is the lack of parking space, which reduces traffic a lot. People coming in this part of the city are always in a hurry, which is why he wants to take his shop to a mall. The move will happen in July-August, Kapetanopoulos added.
He now has two Haagen Dazs-es, a regular shop and a mobile shop near the cinema in Baneasa Shopping City.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)