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Retailer Profile RETAILER PROFILE 1 0 KITCHENWARE NEWS & HOUSEWARES REVIEW ■ JUNE 2014 ■ www.kitchenwarenews.com Retailer Profile Steve, bought The Happy Cook in 2005. The store had been at the same location since it's founding in 1978, but in 2009, they moved it into a larger space, upgrading from a location that had only 1,200 square feet of retail floor and a 600 square foot attic used for storage. "When we moved into the current space, that's when we started to be able to offer a lot more," says Monique. "That's when we really hit our stride." With the expansion to the bigger space, The Happy Cook started offering its program of cooking classes around a 12-foot demonstration counter with built-in stove and extra induction burners. Monique is currently planning on an expansion into the next-door space in the shopping center in about 18 months, which will enable a larger dedicated kitchen space that could handle hands-on classes for up to 12 and up to 40 for demonstrations. The classes are taught by local chefs, primarily guest chefs who teach up to two or three classes a year on a rotating schedule for the opportunity to promote their restaurants as well as to collect their teaching fee. "There are a lot of people (chefs) here who love to cook and who are excited to do cooking classes every couple of years," Monique says. "Charlottesville is very much a foodie community – we're in the top 10 for restaurants per capita … Most of the classes are a demonstration class, which works well with the guest chefs. People are interested in interacting with the chefs, learning whether they'd like to go to their restaurants." "We have a set pay schedule that we use with a budget per head for the food. Classes are a standard price, and the chefs work with that budget," she adds. "Everybody has a standard price per head for the food costs and then the chef 's compensation is what's left after that." The class schedule also includes a core of basic classes taught by store staff. Classes are generally offered for 12 to 18 students at a time, and they're offered 10 months per year, excepting November and December, when the store is too busy to accommodate the classes without disrupting the retail environment. That will change once the store expands into the neighboring space, and Monique is hoping that then, the store will be able to offer three to five classes per week, with more technique classes to augment the special menus. "Cooking classes are an offering to help round out our business, but our selection and our merchandising is what people value about our store," Monique says. On its retail floor, the store is decorated with fixtures that are custom-made to fit a traditional homelike decor, with hutches to display merchandise and overhead lighting f rom chandeliers rather than fluorescent fixtures. "We wanted people to feel like they could feel how these things would fit into their homes," Monique says. The store, a Gourmet Catalog member, offers all the quality cookware, bakeware and small electrics brands that people naturally expect of a kitchenware store, along with an exceptionally wide range of cutlery that includes Shun, Chroma, Yaxell and Haiku along with Japanese artisan brands as well as WUSTHOF and J.A. Henckels. "We like to offer quality products, anything that we can find that we can stand behind – at high, low, medium price point – and let customers decide what they feel comfortable investing in, whether that's a $50 knife or a $300 knife," Monique says. "We have a lot of chefs who come in and buy from us, and they definitely buy cutlery. With as many chefs as we have here, there are definitely chefs who come here to buy knives, not just for their restaurants but for their home kitchens." While the shopping center does draw some tourist trade f rom folks who come to visit the University of Virginia and stay long enough to wander around the neighborhood, most of The Happy Cook's customers are local residents who depend on the sales staff 's assurances that everything in the store is going to live up to their expectations. "Our employees are very, very knowledgeable. People who like to cook know that this is the place to go because they can get information. Anything we offer here is good quality, something we stand behind," Monique says. "We're experts in the field. Our customers are rather sophisticated. This is a university town – people come in with questions, they look at reviews. They're not just buying whatever." The Happy Cook (Cont. from Page 1)

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