Georgia On My Mind
By Brian
About a year ago, we had some fun banter internally about which city outside of North Carolina would be our first for Summit expansion. For a while, Charleston was running in the pole position. Then Virginia Beach had its moment as the frontrunner. But for the better part of this fall, Summit has focused its expansion energies on a nearby market that’s bursting with opportunity and offers myriad neighborhoods that would welcome a Summit café.
We’re heading to Atlanta, or even more specifically Roswell, a beautiful and historic city north of its bigger neighbor that felt like a Summit town to us the entire time we walked around.
As we’ve mapped out our aggressive, albeit calculated, growth plans, our approach is to find an underserved market and then flood it with Summit. Not just one café, but several. And not just cafés, but wholesale relationships, and brand partnerships, and generally a commitment from Summit to do all of the things that will allow us to establish a presence in a given market.
The Atlanta area is growing, it's full of young families, with an appreciation for good food and drink. This aligns with how we envision a new city embracing a brand like Summit. We want to get to know Atlanta and its surrounding neighborhoods. We want to sit in traffic on the highway, and cheer at Atlanta FC games, and go for runs on every single Peachtree or Peach Tree street there is.
For us, however, the decision to kickstart out-of-state growth in Roswell had as much to do with identifying the right franchise partners as anything else. Summit is a family-friendly, community-first café business, and we need boots-on-the-ground partners to bring the Summit brand to life. As I write, I am sitting in an office in Davidson, helping to open another café in South Charlotte — how can I genuinely build a brand with community roots while I am four hours to the north? Impossible.
So while Atlanta will become a big part of the Summit story, we also want our franchise partners to write their own versions of a Summit story. In Roswell, we’ve partnered with Brooke and Dustin Logan, longtime Summit fans who are thirsty for a community gathering space to meet their friends, where their kids can run free while the parents drink a latte or a beer or maybe two beers. We’re thrilled to work with the Logans to create the confluence of Summit + Roswell + Logans, and create something both familiar and unique.
We design every store differently, not because it’s easy and not because we’re crazy, but because we believe it’s the only real way to bring a brand to life in a new neighborhood. I want every person who lives in Roswell to feel like this Summit is their Summit, and I want every person who’s visited a Summit in North Carolina to walk in and also say, “Oh, it’s Summit!”
So, what can you expect in Atlanta beyond our first Roswell Summit? Well, as I ambitiously proclaimed in this interview with the Atlanta Business Chronicle, Summit plans to open two more metro Atlanta locations in 2022, and 10 local cafes by 2025. We’re actively seeking more franchise partners, and more neighborhoods that need a specialty coffee shop where you can hang with your two-year-old, get a cappuccino with beautiful latte art, and wind down on Friday evenings with whatever friends you’ll run into. We can’t wait to start introducing the Summit brand to more people in and around Atlanta, and that future starts now.
Interested in learning more about franchising with Summit Coffee? Fill out the form below or shoot a note over to kate@summitcoffee.com to learn more!