Cafe

2 Cafe Success Stories [2024]

Pat Walls

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Updated: October 8th, 2024

A charming and profitable venture worth considering is opening your own café. Imagine a cozy corner where people gather to enjoy good coffee, delicious pastries, and the comforting hum of conversation—this is the essence of a café.

Starting a café involves securing a location, developing a unique menu, hiring skilled staff, and marketing your new hotspot to attract customers. It's a venture that combines culinary arts, hospitality, and community-building.

The allure of owning a café lies in creating a welcoming space that becomes a daily ritual for patrons, a place where stories are shared and friendships are forged. If you’re passionate about coffee culture and enjoy creating inviting atmospheres, this could be a highly rewarding business idea. Embrace the challenge, and you could become the heart of your local community.

In this list, you'll find real-world cafe success stories and very profitable examples of starting a cafe that makes money.

1. XO Marshmallow ($1.3M/year)

Lindzi Shanks, co-founder of XO Marshmallow, started the business after her partner Kat Connor created homemade marshmallows as a gift and received overwhelming feedback. Realizing the potential, they decided to launch an online shop and later opened the world's first marshmallow café. They relied on customer feedback and suggestions to develop new flavors and products, using their culinary and branding expertise to create a successful lifestyle brand.

How much money it makes: $1.3M/year
How much did it cost to start: $200
How many people on the team: 7

How We Started A $1.5M/Year Gourmet Marshmallow Brand With $200

XO Marshmallow, the premier gourmet marshmallow company and home of the first marshmallow café, discusses how they became the leader in their market by creating a compelling lifestyle brand primarily through social media and organic traffic, leading them to do $1.5 million in sales last year with continued YoY growth ranging from 25-300%.

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2. Camper Cafe ($180K/year)

Beth Baxter co-founded Camper Cafe, a mobile coffee van business, when her partner decided to convert his vintage VW campervan into a trailer for his motorcycles. Baxter suggested putting a coffee machine in the trailer instead, and the idea took off. Now, 11 years later, Camper Cafe is on its sixth mobile coffee unit and supplies major sporting events and works with international brands, generating around £150k in revenue from only 70 days of work per year.

How much money it makes: $180K/year
How much did it cost to start: $5K
How many people on the team: 2

We Built A Coffee Shop In A Van That Makes $180K/Year

This case study follows the co-founder of Camper Cafe, a mobile coffee van business which started as a hobby and now has 6 units that supply the UK's biggest sporting events, commercial and film shoots, generating around £150k from working only 70 days of the year.

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