How We Think - Bella Mia Matcha

Some thoughts on quality, branding, retail and customer experience from running a small matcha bar in London, Ontario.

6 MIN READ

There is a slightly uncomfortable amount of branding in business right now.

We obviously care about branding. This entire page is partly about it.

First, there is quality.

And “quality” is an annoying word because practically every business claims it.

What interests us is what happens when quality becomes inconvenient.

Quality gets expensive when you actually mean it

It’s easy to care about quality when the better option costs the same.

The real test comes when it doesn’t.

Matcha is an agricultural product. Harvests change. Supply changes. Prices move. The matcha you bought before may cost considerably more the next time you need it, or you may not be able to get enough of it at all.

That’s when quality starts becoming an actual business problem.

You can protect your margin, protect your price, or protect the product.

Sometimes you can’t protect all three at exactly the same time.

We would rather have that argument internally than quietly make the drink worse and hope nobody notices.

We care about what it tastes like. How consistent it is. How it works with milk. If we can serve it properly at volume. And, eventually, if the numbers make any sense.

Because the opposite mistake exists too.

Food and drink businesses have another problem now: something can look considerably better than it tastes.

We don’t want Bella Mia to become good at that.

A drink can have the right color, the right cup and the right photo and still be disappointing once somebody takes the first sip.

That’s actually worse than having an ugly drink. At least the ugly drink didn’t make a promise first.

So when we work on something new, how it looks matters. Of course it does. People see before they taste. But the order matters too.

Branding can’t rescue a product forever

This is probably where our thinking about branding actually starts.

We don’t see branding as a way to convince people that an ordinary product is extraordinary.

We see it as a way of giving a good product the identity it deserves.

There is a big difference.

The storefront can get your attention and he name can make you remember us.

Instagram can make you curious.

The experience can make the visit feel different.

But eventually somebody has to drink the matcha.

That moment is remarkably difficult to brand your way out of. And we like that.

It keeps the business honest.

Once the product is good, everything around it starts to matter

This is where running a physical shop gets interesting.

Because making a good drink isn’t enough either.

You start noticing things you never paid attention to as a customer. Why does one store look busy with four people inside while another looks dead with ten?

Why can you recognize some businesses from half a block away without reading the sign?

Why does one menu make you immediately know what you want while another makes ordering feel like homework?

Why will somebody happily pay for one product and hesitate over another that costs almost the same?

Why does adding something to a menu sometimes make the menu worse?

And why can two businesses sell essentially the same category of product while one feels like a brand and the other simply feels like a place that sells it desperately?

We’ve developed opinions about those things.

Some have changed since we opened. Some became stronger. A few things we were completely wrong about.

So we decided to write some of them.

Not because we’ve figured retail out. We run one small matcha bar in London, Ontario.

But running one small matcha bar gives you a surprisingly close view of how people behave around a business.

You watch them approach it. You watch them read. You see where they hesitate. You hear what they ask. You see what they order again. You see what they photograph. You notice what they don’t notice at all, despite the fact that you spent three hours worrying about it.

After a while, you start having opinions.

These are some of ours.

Looking like a real company before you’re a big company

We’ve been asked a surprising number of times if Bella Mia is a chain.

That’s probably one of the nicest accidental compliments we’ve received.

There is one Bella Mia. It’s at 605 Richmond Street in London, Ontario.

We like the question, though, because it points to something we believe about small businesses: being independent isn’t a reason to look improvised.

Customers don’t care how many locations you have when they’re deciding if they trust what you’ve put in front of them. They see the storefront, menu, packaging, website, Instagram and product. If those things seem to belong to five different companies, explaining that you’re a small business doesn’t fix it.

Bella Mia occupies a very small space, but we never wanted the outside of the business to apologize for the size of the inside. We kept the main sign simple: the name, what we do, and not much else.

We could have filled the windows with prices, promotions, delivery logos and photos of drinks. All of that information would be technically useful.

It also taught us something.

People don’t know how large your company is. They know how seriously it presents itself.

That doesn’t mean pretending to be bigger than you are.

It means the first location deserves the same care you imagine giving the tenth.

If you made it this far, thank you.

If you’ve ever walked into Bella Mia, ordered something, recommended us, criticized us, posted us, brought a friend, or even just wondered what that little matcha shop on Richmond was doing 

you’ve been part of the thinking on this page too.

Thanks for giving us something worth thinking about.

Bella Mia Matcha
605 Richmond Street, London