Turkish spices shop

I think that nowadays people love unusual food with foreign (most oriental) shades and opening a store of this
kind will help the curious people to get closer with this culture and the fact that in my home town there are not
stores specialized in spices will help me in order to develop my business idea.

My plan is to own together with my cousin a spices shop in which we won’t only sell the products, but to
support our selling with a strong seller-client relationship by talking with them, inform them about our products
and make them come again. Even more, we would like to invite them to drink a cup of Turkish coffee or a cup
of green tea prepared like in Turkey, while they can listen come traditional music in the background, so they
would have a great time in our store.

If the business starts making convenient profits, we will try to introduce some pre-packed types of traditional
food. The profitability of selling this food will be tested by giving free samples to the clients followed by a short
questionnaire regarding their opinion about the products and the possible price.

Talking about the place of the boutique, it will be in the Old Town in Alexandria. There is a wonderful area,
with a lot of restaurants, bars and other stores and the big plus is that that part of the city is very visited not only
by the locals, but by tourists too. The place where I will open the boutique has a little warehouse to storage the
spices before it goes to the shelf and hopefully that place will be still available.

The next step for starting the business is represented by the type of society, the number of employees and their
distribution. My business will be a partnership with one of my cousins, so it will be a Limited Liability
Company. Being designed as a boutique, at the beginning, the only employees will be only my cousin and me.
We will have a schedule in which each one of us will sell the products. After 2 or 3 years of installing and
developing the affair, if all goes right, we will extend in other places and we will need more human resources.

The main costs at the beginning would be relatively low because we only need money for the equipment (glass
and wood shelves, a cash register, a computer, a printer, some decoration and paint) followed by the rent costs
which will be monthly paid to the owner of that place.My cousin have connections with Turkish distributors, so
they can negociate the prices of the spices and settle at a price offer and ask to deliver them to Bucharest or
directly to the shop.

Another essential “tool” of developing the boutique is the advertising part. We will mostly be based on on-line
advertising and doing so, we will create a Facebook page and a web page (because are lower and the impact is
higher than leaflets for example) but we will have also some traditional publicity materials like stickers glued
on the panels in the city. We will also have some weekly events called “Product X Day” in which some samples
of certain spices will be given for free. This event will also help us to promote not so known assortments of
spices.

We won’t have a special targeted customer segment. Everyone is welcomed to come and try our spices, be we
focus on the millennial people because they are more opened to new tastes of food and also their health allow
them to eat spicy food more often than older persons.

In the end, we would like to have a business in which the action of trading some products in order to gain
profits won’t be felt by our customers. Moreover, the experience in our boutique should be felt like a few
moments in a traditional Turkish store because we love that country with all its traditions and our goal is to
transmit as much as we can how the oriental life is.