With the addition of these designs, Bad Ass Coffee now has five main options for franchisees to choose from: traditional inline, endcap drive-thru, freestanding single or double drive-thru with no indoor seating, freestanding drive-thru with full café, and nontraditional kiosk (grocery, shopping malls, airports, transportation centers, etc.)
Snyder believes operators will mostly seek endcap drive-thru locations because the building infrastructure already exists and just needs to be leased. For those that are developers, he says there’s more interest in owning the building as well as the dirt, meaning they’ll lean toward freestanding buildings.
In any given market, there will be a mix of prototypes, but Snyder thinks it’s important that the first store in an area has a café.
“Whether it's an inline unit or whether it's an endcap or whether it's a freestanding store,” Snyder says. “I do think that's important, especially as the brand moves into new markets to get that full Bad Ass Coffee of Hawaii brand experience because we are very much so an experiential brand. After that, I think you can have a lot more flexibility with the store types, depending on where they're going to be situated.”
Bad Ass Coffee expects to debut 25-30 units 2022 and continue with that cadence in the years beyond. The long-term goal is to open 150 shops in the next five years. The focus will be on the Southeast and Southwest in places like Pensacola Beach, Florida, Orange Beach, Alabama, Nashville, Scottsdale, Phoenix, and Orange County, California. More openings are planned for the home state of Colorado, as well, in Denver and Colorado Springs.
The other emphasis will be for Bad Ass Coffee to strengthen its Hawaiian roots and build upon two remaining locations in Maui.
“We strive to be as authentic um as we can and we want to invest in that. That's a big focus for us,” Snyder says. “Number one, it's important to be a Hawaiian brand and have a Hawaiian presence, but number two, I think it also gives us a better first-hand experience as to what it means to be authentic because we're trying very hard and we're working very hard to be true to where this brand started.”
In light of inflation and supply chain delays, Snyder says the company has adjusted its expectations in terms of timelines of store openings. To achieve its goal of 25-30 shops in 2022, Bad Ass Coffee will order materials much further in advance than it did two years ago.
As for the bigger goal of 150 debuts, Snyder says it will come down to alignment between management and franchisees on overall vision—what this brand is and how it’s going to evolve in the coming years.
“That helps us to prioritize what's most important to ensure that our franchisees are successful in every phase of the process,” Snyder says. “From the day they sign, until the day we open the doors and in the grand opening a few weeks later, we're committed to their success and committed to continuing to build and refine this infrastructure to justify their investment and confidence in us.”
