Client Spotlight: Electric Cycle Café

Posted: 23 Mar 2023

Back in January we officially reached our 1 millionth customer since we first started in the print business.

The business, unbeknownst to them until recently, to become our the 1 millionth customer was Electric Cycle Café, an artisan coffee and ebike specialist in the heart of Farnham, Surrey.

Placing 13 orders in the last 2 years, we’ve successfully supported Electric Cycle Café’s marketing by printing a range of business cards, posters and flyers for their shop, with their latest purchase of 500 350gsm silk business cards from us are currently being used as loyalty cards for customers visiting their shop.

We’ve spent some time catching up with Peter, the owner of Electric Cycle Café, to find out more about his mission and how print marketing has helped him reach his business goals.

What’s your mission? Tell us about your business!

We are an independent shop (not part of a chain) and care about the environment. All of the energy used in our cafe is from renewable sources. We even heat the cafe with a form of 'air-source heat pump', extracting warmth from outside, without the need to burn fossil fuels to keep our customers warm.

We also care about local businesses. Wherever possible, we buy local and encourage our customers to stay local. The ebikes that we sell allow the people of Farnham to reach anywhere in the town in just a few minutes, without pollution, parking charges and, getting some mild exercise to boot! So, we collect the majority of the produce sold in our cafe by ebike. Sometimes with a trailer carrying up to 50kg of payload! For example, we can bring 32 pints of milk back from the local supermarket on one bike just using 2 standard cycle panniers.

What challenges has your business faced and how have you overcome these?

It’s probably the increase in energy prices, even with our renewable energy, both ourselves and our customers are feeling the pinch.

We’ve seen our customer’s spending drop continuously since around spring 2022. However, we’ve responded with a new food range and introduced a loyalty card using instantprint’s business cards, which have proved very popular. We’ve also advertised our food range and new models of ebike in our A-frame that’s located on the street. We use instantprint’s A1 waterproof posters featuring colourful and eye-catching designs to draw in the attention of passers-by on the street. Being quite affordable we replace these many times per year so we can keep our marketing fresh and up to date!

Which print products have helped you to successfully market your business?

Definitely business cards and A1 vinyl posters! I also run a voluntary organisation that has used A5 leaflets from instantprint too.

How do you make your customers feel special and or understood?

Although we have used instantprint’s business cards as their main purpose, to distribute our brand, we’ve also used them to create loyalty cards. When customers have purchased 8 drinks, the 9th is on us. We found that this rewards regular customers and is also far simpler to use than a smartphone app that needs installing and where the customer needs to register. People have too many apps and not enough free coffee, we believe!

What are your top print tips for other businesses in your industry?

Use a printer that has a fast turnaround on their products!

Usually, a lot of training and preparation will have gone into designing a new product or service. Being able to quickly market it using print will allow you to get a faster return on all of the time and money invested. We can't usually order our marketing materials until all of the details have been sorted out i.e. right at the end of the development. So, it’s important to have a printer with a fast turnaround. It will allow your business to respond quickly to opportunities, that’s why I love using instantprint.

Why did you choose to print with instantprint?

They’re fast, reliable, and reasonably priced! We’ve found this also applies to when you’re ordering larger quantities say 500 or 1000 business cards, posters or leaflets, like we have in the past.

What’s one piece of advice you would have given yourself when starting out?

Pivot! If one thing doesn't work as well as you needed it to, quickly change to something similar, but better. Responding to change in an instant is important.

How did you feel when you found out that you were our 1 millionth customer?

Very surprised that our tiny cafe has been picked out from such a mountainous market. ebikes can change the world for the better and we want to tell everyone the good news. 'Make hills disappear' is our motto but maybe not this mountain.