Ask Muddy Cup café chain CEO Jim Svetz how he’s built or markets his business and you’ll get the same answer: “Organically.”
Owner of six cafes—in Staten Island, Hudson, Beacon, Catskill, Albany, and Kingston—with three new cafes opening this year in Poughkeepsie, New Paltz, and Schenectady, Svetz has grown his business over six years “only by requests from building owners or cities.” He adds, jokingly, “If they ask us, we will come.” Likewise, his “grassroots” marketing program is based on word-of-mouth advertising and maintaining strong presences in local communities and on the web.
Svetz, a 20-year marketing veteran, opened the first Muddy Cup in Staten Island on September 1, 2001. Three years later, friends asked him to open a second café in Hudson. Although he says he had not planned to expand, “People really responded to us.” The Albany café opened in 2005, followed by Beacon in 2006, and Catskill and Kingston in early 2007.
By the end of 2007, Svetz will own nine Hudson Valley cafes. He has been asked to open Muddy Cups as far away as Jacksonville, FL, and Oklahoma City, but isn’t interested. “It’s about being local,” he says. Nor does he want to be seen as a franchise. “Franchises as an easy way out,” he says. “Making a Muddy Cup means making it a local community’s cafe.”
What makes the Muddy Cup different from, say, Starbucks (which Svetz considers his main competitor) is free WiFi and Internet services, use as venues for local performers and organizations, and a varying yet distinctive look. Each Muddy Cup space is stripped empty, painted the same deep red, lit with homey lamps rather than overhead lights, and filled with antique and retro furniture.
With each café’s opening, Svetz avoids most prior promotion. “I want people to discover us and tell their friends that we’re the new cool space,” he says. “If everyone finds out about us at once, we’re not special.” Instead, he focuses on connecting with other local businesses. For instance, Woodstock radio station WDST, is supplied daily with free fresh-roasted coffee from Muddy Cup’s new coffee line—a conscious local branding technique. “The product carries the vision,” says Svetz, who is developing a line of specialty blends to be named after each café’s well-known local entities, like WDST’s morning show hosts Gattine and Franz.
“Being socially oriented is everything,” says Svetz. “So is tracking your community connections.” His website, www.muddycup.com, is linked to separate MySpace accounts for each café, several SUNY Albany students’ Facebook accounts, local cultural and music venues’ and bookstores’ websites, and the websites of local municipalities and Chambers of Commerce. The website offers directions, opening hours, and calendar listings for each café; print articles; testimonials; product information; and Svetz’s blog, featuring day-in-the-life anecdotes like how it was to wait on Uma Thurman. Being “big on pix—there’s nothing worse than a website overloaded with text,” Svetz has packed the website with images and videos of onsite TV news reports about each opening. “We have 2,000 to 3,000 hits a day on the website, and 1,400 new users every month,”
he says. “MySpace is a great marketing tool. You can attach to a lot of people through it, and notify them of events without having to keep track of mailing lists and contact information. Plus, you can literally filter people coming to your page from within a 10-mile radius, say, plus certain demographics.”
Muddy Cup may be a chain, but thanks to virtual and community social networks, it’s more than that. Svetz explains: “Cafes should come from communities and money should go back into communities. We host local venues, make the cafes visually appealing to art-focused but not necessarily high-income people, and sponsor things like local kids’ sports. We have community links. People can call their Muddy Cup ‘ours’ and tell the big franchises, ‘Ours is better than yours.’”