Janine Allis was living in Melbourne. She opened the first Boost Juice in Adelaide.
That decision is the most useful thing in the entire story and it almost never makes the retelling, because it is not a decision about ambition. It is a decision about where to be bad at something.
Adelaide was chosen because it carried less financial risk. Lower costs, cheaper leases, and the ability to learn from mistakes and build a business model out of the spotlight of a larger city. It was also Jeff Allis’s hometown. The first store opened on King William Street in the Adelaide CBD in 2000, funded by selling the family home and around $250,000 of start-up capital, some of it borrowed from friends. Neither founder had retail experience. Allis was 32, on maternity leave with her third child.
She had left school at sixteen and worked more than thirty jobs across three continents before any of this. The idea itself came from a trip to the United States in 1999, where she noticed juice bars drawing serious mass-market demand and saw that Australian customers were choosing between traditional cafes, takeaways and soft drink retailers with nothing in between. Working with nutritionists and naturopaths, she built a menu free of preservatives and artificial colours and flavours.
Then it went quickly. One store to a hundred within roughly three years. More than 175 across Australia and New Zealand by 2004. By 2007 there were stores in the United Kingdom, Chile, Kuwait, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand, and the group grew its bottom line through the financial crisis. Within five years the brand had a 95 percent consumer awareness rating in Australia. Today Boost operates hundreds of stores across more than a dozen countries under Retail Zoo, alongside Salsas Fresh Mex and Betty’s Burgers. Allis took Telstra Australian Business Woman of the Year in 2004 and entered the Franchise Hall of Fame in 2015.
But go back to Adelaide, because that is the transferable part.
The instinct when opening anything is to open where the opportunity is largest. Biggest city, best street, most footfall. What that gets you is the highest possible rent while you are still working out what you are doing, and an audience of the people whose opinion matters most watching you do it badly.
The first site of anything is not a revenue opportunity. It is a laboratory that happens to take money over the counter. Its job is to teach you what the actual product is, how long service really takes, what people order at four in the afternoon and what the staffing genuinely costs. Every one of those lessons is cheaper to learn at provincial rent.
And crucially, mistakes made in a smaller market do not follow you. A shaky first fortnight in the second city is a shaky first fortnight. The same fortnight on a flagship street becomes the thing everyone remembers about your brand.
Allis’s own account of the Adelaide opening is that they had people coming for kilometres and long queues, and they could not go wrong.
They could have gone wrong. That was rather the point of Adelaide.
Source: NeTT Business News, “Janine Allis And The Unglamorous Build Of Boost Juice”
