The New York Times's City Room blog looks at Crumbs Bakeshop's expansion plans (which we were told about at BEA - Mia Bauer is also releasing Crumbs Bake Shop in a Box next month from DK):
But Crumbs, which started in 2003 with a single store on the Upper West Side, is expanding more aggressively, with 40 planned stores over the next year and 150 within the next five years. (All self-financed.)...
Mia and Josh Bauer, the couple who opened up Crumbs, see Krispy Kreme as a cautionary tale. “We look at them all the time,” Ms. Bauer said. “We don’t want to make the same mistakes by overexpanding.”
“I was a fanatic when they opened up,” she said. “They pirated themselves by overexpanding and the quality dropped immediately. Their choices were not the greatest. You could get them in the gas stations.”
There are now several Crumbs shops in New York and two in Los Angeles.
“We will expand to places where there is a demand,” Ms. Bauer said. “We want to be very careful and strategic and not to expand too quickly.”
One sign of demand is the large volume of requests that Crumbs gets for shipping. (Last year, it stopped shipping until it could come up with a better process.)
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