Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Michelle Webb. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Michelle, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?
The Cheese Shop is a majority woman-owned and family-operated culinary destination for specialty food enthusiasts in North Carolina’s Triangle region (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill). We are based in downtown Carrboro, adjacent to Main Street. We offer an elevated selection of local, domestic and imported cheeses, charcuterie and provisions through our retail store. We also offer private and corporate catering, events, classes and workshops, and a thriving wholesale/B2B offering for chefs, restaurants, breweries and retailers. In our store and through our experiences, we pride ourselves on creating an intimate and interactive experience that is curated by a talented team of resident cheesemongers, chefs, partners, and event planners who’ve collectively dedicated 75+ years to the food and service industry.
It would be difficult to succeed simply as a cut-to-order retail shop; margins are tight, volume is limiting, and many consumers require significant education to convert as customers. With this strategic consideration in mind from the beginning, The Cheese Shop was designed to be flexible, and to be more than a singular retail revenue stream. Over time, our business has evolved to seven high-growth potential revenue streams across consumer and B2B that help significantly diversify our revenue and stabilize seasonal surges and downturns, especially in a college town.
As an owner, I have thrived on the hustle and grind of creating a food service business in a post-COVID world. Our first year, like many businesses, was spent as a pop up, but we delivered in the form of a mobile cheese shop at a local, weekly farmer’s market given the challenges and uncertainties of commercial real estate. Our brick and mortar — just 80 square feet inside of a full service wine bar, provided the luxury of time to experiment, fail fast and fail forward, build a following, save on rent, and incubate partnerships with other small businesses.
We took nine months to break even compared to industry standard of 18 months to 3 years. The Cheese Shop has also evolved in under 3 years to seven high-growth potential revenue streams across consumer and B2B that help significantly diversify our revenue and stabilize seasonal surges and downturns. These eight revenue streams fall under retail | direct-to-consumer or wholesale | business-to-business. Our business goals in the next year include building and expanding our local presence to a 2,000 square foot space, creating a dine-in experience at our 16-seat cheese bar, bottle shop, and classes and education offering. We expect our gross sales to increase to $750K in 2024.
Michelle, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
As a female “intrepreneur” at heart, I have spent nearly 20 years building high-performing teams, portfolios, and practices within the private sector and specifically large corporations and pharma companies. Trained in the field of marketing and public relations through several in-house and agency roles, I am actually quite new to the food and beverage industry but have maintained a connection to food through event planning experience and my obsessive attention to flavor, perfect bites, and culinary experiences. Taking my experience as a builder of teams, portfolios and business units, I ventured to deploy this experience in a small business setting as a founder and head of operations of The Cheese Shop. In partnership with my husband (the cheese professional), we’ve had considerable success in our early years of co-founding The Cheese Shop. On the heels of a global pandemic and a completely transformed retail and restaurant industry, we doubled down on a gap in our community (specialty food retail in a college town), developed a business model that extends across retail and B2B, and created a lucrative, award-winning, pop up cheese and wine dinner concept. While my career has solely focused on healthcare for many years, In my role, it is my attention, rigor and creativity as our head of operations that has us well-positioned for continued growth. I am delighted to translate the communications rigor of my corporate career to small business leadership in downtown Carrboro, NC.
Much like the wine offering in the Raleigh-Durham area, most people are accustomed to buying their cheese from grocery chains, big box stores or local co-ops. This means that most people are limited to pre-packaged and mass-produced products that lack flavor and quality ingredients, and wedges are left out for days or even weeks. Further, the customer service is lacking. Questions go unanswered, are answered incorrectly, or no staff are made available.
At the same time, the average customer’s palate in the Triangle region is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Specialty food knowledge for wine, cheese, tinned fish, and caviar is becoming highly valued by the elite foodie customer. In addition, the Triangle continues to be flooded with a significant migration of people from large, sophisticated food cities like New York, San Francisco, and Austin, TX.
These customers are expecting a more unique, higher quality, interactive and tailored experience from retailers and restaurants that they may otherwise force them to Raleigh, Durham or elsewhere.
The Cheese Shop is a majority woman-owned and family-operated culinary destination for Triangle specialty food enthusiasts based in downtown Carrboro. We offer an elevated selection of local, domestic and imported cheeses, charcuterie and provisions through our retail store. We also offer private and corporate catering, events, classes and workshops, and a thriving wholesale/B2B offering for chefs, restaurants, breweries and retailers.
In our store and through our experiences, we pride ourselves on creating an intimate and interactive experience that is curated by a talented team of resident cheesemongers, chefs, partners, and event planners who’ve collectively dedicated 75+ years to the food and service industry.
While our recent success within an 80-square-foot shared space inside Glasshalfull has been encouraging, we are in the perfect position to expand and grow our business significantly over the next 3-5 years in Orange County.
In late summer 2024, The Cheese Shop will expand to a 2,000 square foot retail space in downtown Carrboro (100B Brewer Lane), located directly next to Belltree Cocktail Club and Carolina Car Wash.
It will be the only food destination within walking distance of the forthcoming Brewer Lane location from historic Carrboro music venue, Cat’s Cradle.
The venue will be a two-story live music venue with a 1,000-person capacity and is expected to host 3-4 shows a week. There are also discussions about the re-opening of Crook’s Corner, a stone’s throw from our location– and with that, a full revival of Brewer Lane.
Going well beyond the confines of a cheese counter at our Glasshalfull location, our second location will include the Triangle’s first-ever cheese bar, cut-to-order cheese counter, retail & bottle shop, and go-to destination for cheese classes, workshops, events, and tastings. We will also expand our wholesale and catering offerings.
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
We were still very new, maybe our first 8 months as a pop up and we had been refused commercial leases by a couple of management companies and were really down about it. We thought we’d never get our own space. We end up compromising and getting a space within a restaurant and it is SMALL. 80 square feet. Not to mention, we cannot do a lot of things that would make us a lot of money — prepared food/cheese boards/no beer or wine sales (no kitchen space and competes with menu at the restaurant), events and classes (if we’re lucky we can host 1-2 classes a month), and wholesale (storage for high volume clients is extremely limited).
So, we had to get very creative. In March 2023, we did a small dinner with a cocktail bar (speakeasy) in town that we called Speakcheesy (see what we did there?). And at first it was so lo-fi. We charged $100 per ticket, sold about 35 tickets, brought in wine from a distributor, served every course on disposables. and there was no kitchen. Everything was served room temp. I can laugh about this now. Over the course of 4-5 months, we did this every month. We brought in a local advanced sommelier to pair all six courses with six wines, we fully equipped ourselves with smallwares, portable kitchen equipment, a trained fine dining chef, printed menus, and an amazing team to develop the menu, refine service, and elevate our customer experience. Pretty soon we could charge $200 a person, increase our sales to almost 70 people and sell out every. single. time.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
We were very intentional about reaching into the community and finding experts where we lacked knowledge because we are still very new to the food and beverage industry. Those partnerships turned into major, revenue-driving events, long-term catering prospects, and restaurant wholesale opportunities.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://cheeseshopnc.com
- Instagram: @cheeseshopnc
Image Credits
Stacey Sprenz