Knoops' Global Expansion: The First Step in Our Journey to Become the World Leader in Chocolate Drinks
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As you all know Knoops are doing for chocolate drinks what Howard Schultz did with Starbucks for coffee. Chocolate drinks is a larger addressable global market than coffee and I am here to bring the vision and direction to the growing and incredible team here at Knoops who work hard every day to make this happen. We will remain the global leader in this category.There is a great document on the Starbucks website which is a timeline of number of stores opened and other significant events on their journey from one outlet to over 35,000.
We are ahead of Starbucks in progress to date from day one - and my job is to carefully navigate the slope of our growth to maintain first mover advantage while delighting the growing number of our fans and to empower our team members here - all of whom so far on the journey will become owners.
Today is the opening of our first international store. We had so many large franchisee discussions for the Middle East but we first wanted a partner who would build a joint venture.
We are a multi channel brand not just a cafe business and we needed someone who could understand that and put in the time - Karim Samha approached us and I met with his inspiring family both in Dublin and London. Karim came and worked here in the UK to really understand our culture. Together we will build a series of stores in the UAE to showcase Knoops and allow us to perfect localised operations across stores and retail both in DTC and wholesale.
We will then work with great country specific operators in the various countries in this region in a world class franchise situation to scale Knoops in the optimum manner - to create the global brand we know it will become if it is nurtured correctly.