For $70 a month, customers at Eva's Garage in Wellington can have as many free drinks as they want. File photo. Photo: Public domain
A new Wellington café is hoping its subscription coffee offer will be key to finding its feet in a tough hospitality environment.
Two months in, Jarrod Strong of Eva's Garage, says things are going well despite coffee prices rising and hospitality spending still being slow.
He said the café had developed a group of regulars early on, and its subscription "fuel club" had been designed with them in mind.
For $70 a month, customers can have as many free drinks as they want. For $30 a month, all drinks are $2 and for $15 a month, all drinks are half-price.
He said people had asked about coffee cards but they did not want to offer those. "You start getting stamps and in a year you find you have 10 cards with five stamps on each one."
"We were thinking of different ways we could do it… we decided a subscription service was a good way to build more of a community focus around what we were trying to achieve."
The idea had initially just been for the free coffee options, he said, but they realised there needed to be some flexibility for customers who could not come in as often.
For someone buying a standard flat white, the unlimited free coffee card would pay off after 13 coffees a month.
It had been the most popular option with customers.
Strong said it would be trial and error from the café's perspective to determine whether the model worked financially.
He said while some customers might buy a lot of coffees through their subscriptions, others might not have so many, and people might also be more inclined to purchase other things, or bring friends.
"Some people are going to have more and stronger coffees more often, others not so many...We've pitched it around how we could structure something that would encourage them to come back to us, buy other things and engage with our store on an ongoing basis, connect with us on that personal level and have that sense of community and belonging.
"As much as times are tough and people are very conscious of the money they're spending, coffee is so habitual. We've found it doesn't really matter what the price is, people will go and get their morning coffee."
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
