Next Stop Is…
By Brian May 12, 2021
Since 2019, we’ve probably thrown around two dozen cities and towns as our first out-of-state Summit markets. It’s a fun happy hour topic, it’s fun road trip banter, talking about why a Summit café would work in this city, or who could move to that city to lead operations.
But as we’ve expanded throughout North Carolina — first to Asheville, then to Chapel Hill, then to our backyard in Charlotte — we’ve had more realistic conversations about this next market. We’ve had conversations with interested partners from Massachusetts to Florida, and Georgia to Oregon. It’s at the same time flattering and noisy.
So we set out this year to choose our future. In my favorite novel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s mystifying “100 Years of Solitude,” one character says to another, “You can’t eat hope.” To which the other character responds, “You can’t it eat it, but it sustains you.”
The hope that sustains us is the belief that Summit can be the local coffee shop, time and time again. The hope is that the same way Summit makes someone in Davidson feel, the way a visit to our Asheville cafés makes someone feel, that’s the feeling we want to gather, bottle up, and recreate in new towns and cities.
There’s a difference between being a national coffee brand that is known, ubiquitously, as a national coffee brand, and being a coffee brand that has dozens of local communities around the nation that love it. We’re aiming to be the latter. We’re hoping that we can package the Summit experience, the feeling, and replicate that in new markets. So we’ve chosen our future, we’ve leaned into this hope and scoured the country to find the next city where we can make Summit a thing people in that community care about, rave about.
We’re coming to Charleston, in 2022. In so many ways, it’s a logical venture for us geographically — it’s one state to the south, a three hour drive, a place so many people who know Summit go to spend time.
But we’re choosing Charleston for more than that. We’re choosing Charleston because it’s one of the great food cities in the U.S. And where there’s a great food culture, there’s a need for a great coffee culture. We’re choosing Charleston because it’s a growing city, because there’s a palpable energy on the streets and in the air.
Most of all, though, we’re choosing Charleston because the vibrancy of the neighborhoods. We spent two days walking the streets in Daniel Island, driving through Mount Pleasant, having dinner on the marsh in James Island. Charleston is so much more than King Street, and art galleries and historic churches. That’s part of the charm, sure, but it’s in the pockets of homes and local businesses all around that main peninsula where we could envision Summit coming to life. We’re choosing Charleston because of the young families, the active professionals, because of people who love to visit there — all those groups exist in this lovely city just a morning’s drive away.
What does this mean? Well, for starters, we’re going to find great partners in Charleston because a café that’s going to becoming part of a neighborhood fabric is best if it’s operated by someone who knows those neighborhoods, knows the neighbors. We want to find those people that love Charleston as much as we love Davidson and Asheville, Chapel Hill and Charlotte. Those who understand the joy and community Summit can bring to a town, and want to bring it to theirs.
Spreading our wings outside of North Carolina, after 23 years operating in this one state, is a landmark moment for Summit Coffee. So we set out to choose a place where we could build a new foundation, recreate the joy of the Summit brand, and open cafés where you’ll be thrilled to run into your neighbors every Saturday morning. And in 2022, that happens in Charleston.
link to original journal.