Blank Street’s managing director for the UK, Ignacio Llado, speaks to Retail Week about bringing fun back to coffee and challenging the status quo of the big chains
Blank Street is the new kid on the block in London’s competitive coffee scene. Starting from a single coffee cart in Brooklyn, New York, in 2020, it now has 43 stores in the US and over 20 in London. It has amassed a cult following in the process.
Its signature sage green walls and philosophy appeal to both the iced-coffee-addicted Gen Z, who religiously share pictures of their drinks on social media, and the more world-weary millennial, who needs a flat white or cold brew running through their veins to take on the world.
At Blank Street’s small but packed Tottenham Court Road cafe, nestled between a Starbucks and a Costa, Llado talks about how the brand wants to break up what he describes as the monotony of the UK’s big coffee chains on the high street.
“London’s coffee scene is unlike any other city. It’s a huge market with almost 2,000 coffee shops in London alone and 75% to 80% of all of them are big chains. It’s the Prets, the Costas, the Starbucks and the Neros. And our view of them is that they haven’t really changed much over the last 10 years.
“So we’ve really come in here to raise the bar. I think that’s very simply why we have come here. And by that, we mean bringing some life back to the stores. It’s bringing life back, it’s bringing character back, it’s bringing fun back. That’s really the underlying thing of everything that we do.
“Bringing some thoughtfulness, curation, fun and positivity back into every single one of the touch points of the experience from the design of the stores to the quality of your flat whites, to the innovation behind our signature drinks, to the customer experience.”
At 28 years old, Llado is driven by attention to detail and has big ambitions for the brand. From the tilling on the floor to the temperature and the music being played in stores, every detail matters to Llado and helps, he believes, set the brand apart from the competition.
”From day one, since we got here in London, everything we’ve done is about the brand. Blank Street has always been about how do we make that part of the customer journey a bit more about the experience versus the transaction.
”Because there are a thousand places for corporate transactions. We always have this tension of how to make this experience frictionless but, at the same time, meaningful. If you go in any one of those directions, you could lose sight of the other.
”For example, if you try to make it too frictionless, it becomes too transactional. But if you make it too experiential, it might not be a place you can go every day. We are always trying to find the balance between trying to make that two-to-three-minute experience a meaningful experience.”
The brand and its managing director are all about that human experience. Llado believes in the high street and is ready to put a bet on it.
”Coming out of Covid, we have a great sense of positivity for London. The fact is that a lot of people are going back to the high street. It’s as busy as it was before and, in some areas, busier. People are coming back to work, which to me is a positive outlook for the future. We are betting on retail, betting on the high street.”
From opening its first store in London on Charlotte Street in February last year to now having 24 stores across the city, Llado believes the secret to the brand’s success is its customers.
”I really think it boils down to exactly what I was saying before. The only way to really challenge the status quo is by properly changing the status quo.
“The reason we’re growing fast is that customers were the first people asking us to come to their neighbourhoods, near their workplaces, reaching out saying: ‘Please, open up in this part of town’. So we are growing based on that demand, not based on our need to grow. That’s what’s truly important. We’ve gone hand in hand with demand.”
As the brand continues to scale, Llado doesn’t have a set target for new stores in the next year as he tries to stay away from the growth formula that may turn Blank Street into one of its big chain competitors.
“We don’t have a number. We want to make sure that every single location we’re going into, we’re going into it with full conviction, from a customer point of view and from a real estate point of view.
“We’re hoping to probably find another 10 to 15 locations next year but we’re trying not to build this too top-down and make it more bottom-up. So if it becomes eight stores, because those are the eight stores we know we really want and we know we can replicate the Blank Street experience there, that’s fine.”
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