By Vernon Velasco
THE best time to put up a business is when you have saved enough money to afford it, and you have worked long enough as an employee in a corporation and have made enough mistakes.
It is okay to make mistakes, but not with your money. Thus said longtime couple Andi Riel Wong and Rodrigo Ang Escobar. Wong, 26, and Escobar, 25, quit their corporate jobs and put up a business with the money originally earmarked for their wedding.
A coffee business wasn’t necessarily according to plan nor was it a passion project. And even if it was carved out of the perennially loaded word, they believe that passion is not really profitable sometimes. So they thought differently and started where the money is and, in the process, turned their venture into a passion.
The original business idea was a hole in the wall serving all things Bicolano, Escobar said. But a coffee shop would be more befiting a corner you go to when all you want is peace and quiet, Wong added.
“The idea behind the concept is that everybody has a corner. All of us have this one confined space we can call our own. The place, the brand name, everything about it is the physical manifestation of that mind-set,” Escobar said. “It may not be the most comfortable space, but it’s a space where you can have the liberty to, say, write everything on the wall.”
Thus, Sulok (Tagalog for corner) Café was born.
Easy find
ALLEY-ISH, the space is wee and narrow, something you would find wedged in street corners. But in this age of Uber and Facebook, Sulok Café is never so hard to find. Personal touches make up the whole nine yards, the walls punctuated by palochina planks.
Sulok Café makes its props from beans that originated from the highlands of Benguet and Sagada, as well as ingredients sourced from the backyard, like malunggay, in the wonderful one-of-a-kind café’s best-seller pasta brainchild of a chef who once worked in the culinary side of MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
At Sulok Café, Wong and Escobar work at the coal face, doing something they don’t equate to work. “It’s rather more like comparable to a baby you can’t wait to go home to when you’re stressed,” Wong said. “We’re here every day, but we’re slowly letting go of the operational tasks and looking for ways to delegate because if you want to grow the business, you ought to let it go.”
What the couple does more is to push the marketing envelope even farther by making sense of their corporate experiences. Escobar worked in the field of digital advertising and Wong in e-commerce. Both have upped the ante in the 10-month-old business’s online social engagement.
“My former job in an advertising agency was to study my client’s competitors, and I did it with Sulok Cafe,” Escobar said. “I did a digital scan of all the brands, of all the competitors of our brand and figured that we stand out at least on a digital level, considering the reception of people online that is way above benchmark and advertising agency standards.”
Going digital
ACCORDING to Escobar, most of the customers who have visited the space and religiously go back said they first came across Sulok Café on Facebook.
In less than six months of operations and being active online, the brand has had a whopping following of 9,000, a media exposure mileage that one can only achieve in a scandal, Escobar said.
Digital is the order of the day and Sulok makes visibility and impressions by maximizing the influence of the online platform, shying away from how businessmen who want to scale up do advertising. “Tri-media is super expensive and, unlike digital, it doesn’t produce as much solid results,” Escobar said. “Yet, not a lot of people believe in digital and many of our competitors still print flyers.”
“Even though some of our competitors have been around for like three to five years, the fact that even before food has become a lucrative business here in Antipolo, they’re here already, some of them hardly have a Facebook page, or, even if they do, they have a very limited number of followers,” he added. “They post content on an annual basis and they don’t engage their audience.”
Moreover, Escobar said when it comes to selling, it’s always the push method, like some vendors do most of the time.
“It’s always traditional. It’s always TVC type. It’s always ‘Come, we got good coffee’.”
Being different
SULOK Café is beyond what’s written on a black-and-white 90-character copy.
It’s not just a place you go to when you need a spike of caffeine: the couple built a personality behind it. This they did when most brands market themselves like a brand.
“Sulok Café is marketed like an actual human being. The brand voice is something our market can identify with, like that of, say, an angry netizen who is part of [President] Duterte’s mob,” Escobar said. “It falls on the sweet spot between sarcasm and being honest because that’s how every person on the Internet typically posts online.”
By building a personality behind it, people become more interested in what Sulok Café is about, instead of what it sells, Wong added. This interest developed with the challenge of putting up a store that has a unique selling proposition and how to stand out when it is a constant that everybody who comes in is serving good food.
