Executive Summary:
Our café, DogHouse Café, is located in Berkeley, California. DogHouse Café has all the basic features other cafés have, which include selling beverages and food. On the other hand, we also sell dog-related goods, such as dog food, mugs with dog logos, and dog tumblers. We offer the opportunity for customers to adopt dogs directly at our café after they interacted with our dogs and found a good fit. However, the adoption fee and the vaccination fee will pass on to our customers, when they decide to adopt dogs. Additionally, we require an hourly entry fee of $10 for our café. Since we are located in a popular area, we have three groups of target customers, which are college students, people looking for dog adoptions, and commuters. Due to size of our business, we take Limited Liability Company (LLC) as our tax structure. This structure benefits us in minimizing tax and allowing us to have unlimited investors. Although our business might have market, health, and financial risks, we can prevent them by taking some precautionary measures. DogHouse café offers an experience that melds the morning commute coffee shop, the lax animal cafe, and the adoption kennel into a uniquely humanitarian establishment. Moreover, our location favors us in allowing us to provide to commuters and college students as well as the natural denizens of Berkeley, and our distinct absence of primary competition and lack of secondary competition provides us an open playing field for our operations. In essence, our competitive advantage is created through our unique culture of featuring dogs rather than cats, our commitment to the rescue and adoption of our dogs, and our ability to simultaneously tap into multiple markets while our competitors are focused on exploiting one market only. The American people love both coffee and dogs, so our ability to attract consumers By considering Berkeley County as an ideal location, we will focus on drawing customers from Berkeley citizens. Our primary targets are college students in Berkeley and people who are looking for dog adoption. With the location advantage, college students with high population may be our main customers. With the popularization of recent dog therapy, our coffee shop is expected to stand out from local cat cafes. According to the UC Berkeley students’ high frequency of visiting cafe chain, we assume that they may come to our cafe and we will provide the place for study and meeting. As UC Berkeley enrollment increased, we foresee that we will have more business opportunity. People who want to adopt dogs are another primary target customers. Since growing number of Berkeley citizens adopted dogs in recent years, we can help more dogs to find their new owners. We regard people who drink coffee as our secondary targets. Despite college students, commuters have the high percentage of Berkeley population. Although people with higher income are more likely to buy coffee, low-income people still drink coffee frequently. Therefore, we sell our coffee to those office workers. However, we are concerned about the decreased population growth rate which may decrease our sales of coffee. Less consumers will buy our coffee and beverages due to the soda tax. DogHouse Café wants people to relax with dogs while having a cup of coffee. If customers want to see our dogs again, they can come visit our cafe whenever they want to. If they are qualified, customers may also choose to adopt one of our dogs. The main marketing strategy of DogHouse café will mostly be utilizing digital and online platforms. Our website and various social media platforms will allow an increase in exposure and communication with customers. Our business will use different methods of advertisement depending on the characteristics and features of each platform. DogHouse Café will be advertised at the University of California, Berkeley and dog parks. When our team meets people in person and promote our business, we will distribute our business card with a QR code. With a QR code, people can easily access our social media platforms by scanning it on their phone.