Churn - Kelley Costa
Good luck keeping up with Churn owner Kelley Costa. With three retail stores, over 60 employees, a growing wholesale business and an eye on franchising next year, you’ll need some caffeine to maintain her pace. She’s a bit of a whirlwind. We caught up with her during a store build-out (she’s also her own general contractor) and we talked about Churn’s success, growth trajectory, and how her passion for creating ice cream flavors brought this professional accountant into the entrepreneurial fold.
So how does an accountant end up owning an ice cream shop?
My parents actually had a soft-serve shop when I was 16, so I knew the business. While I was still doing tax work, I opened Kelley’s Dari-Delite on Babcock Blvd. I had that shop for over six years.
Then, when I was on a trip to New York with my dad, we stopped by an old-style gelato shop (that’s how we bonded). I was there with him and we were looking around, really enjoying the look and feel of the place. We liked the visuals. And we thought, “why doesn’t someone open a place like this near us?”
At the time, Kelley’s Dari-Delite was a seasonal business that had a walk-up window. I figured that we could create a year-round ice cream place that served hot drinks, like coffee, in the winter. Churn opened in Gibsonia in 2015 - a little later than I had anticpated in October - just in time for winter!
Your Gibsonia location opened first, then the Cranberry location in 2017 and the Fox Chapel location in 2019. What’s been working for you in terms of marketing?
Social media is the number one thing we use, although we do start with word-of-mouth. But we invest money into Facebook and we invest resources into Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. We have lots of internal promotions, then blast pictures and posts on social media. Our target demographic is 16 to 24 year-old’s. They tend to come in after 8:30pm. We also get a lot of young families that stop in right after dinnertime.
And we’re constantly showing new products to these groups. Right now we’re working on a fall campaign to mimic drinks for “all of the stuff you missed this summer.” So we have concert-themed drinks and lots of fun stuff launching each week, and we’ve made Tik Tok videos to help promote them.
In terms of traditional media, we use that to a lesser extent because our online marketing - things like posting in Facebook groups - has worked very well for us. But we’ve run ads and coupons in publications like the Hampton News and InCommunity. And the other thing that’s been good for us is giving back to the community and participating in events. We show up at tradeshows. We’ll donate free ice cream or coffee or giftcards to things like community races, fundraisers, and other events. For instance, we donated to a drive-in movie night at the park, we went to Yelp’s Ice Cream Fest, and we gave out free samples at a Macy’s Grand Opening party. We’ve been successful in booking catering events directly from those types of events.
Are you always on the lookout for new events?
We’re to the point that we don’t go out to find events, they seem to find us!
“ I think that a lot of businesses that are struggling are going to have to embrace the “DoorDash 25%’ and try to make it work.”
Has the pandemic changed that?
Well, the events have changed. But as far as our marketing goes, things have stayed pretty much the same. In terms of the business, though, one of the biggest changes was our online ordering, and using services like DoorDash and GrubHub. I don’t know that we wold have tried them. But once the pandemic hit, we decided to try it and there was a two month period where DoorDash accounted for 75% of the business at our Cranberry location.
Has that fundamentally changed the way you do business?
DoorDash is here to stay. The younger people that we target really like it. It’s maybe 25% of our business right now. I don’t see it going away. Mobile ordering has dropped off, but it’ll come back. What I realized was that we need to grow to cover the additional costs of those delivery services so that we can achieve economies of scale. I think that a lot of businesses that are struggling are going to have to embrace the “DoorDash 25%’ and try to make it work.
So what’s next for Churn?
A few things. We’re going to continue to make new flavors of ice cream - that’s my passion! We recently added wedding catering, and that was doing very well pre-COVID. We still have weddings booked. We have brides asking if we can match the cake, or a specific flavor that they like, and as long as I can get a sample of the flavor I can usually turn it into an ice cream. So custom-made flavors will continue to be a large part of our business - we’ve made over 1,000 flavors to date!
We’re getting innovative on social media and we’ll continue to spend resources there, and we’re looking into franchising and seeing how that will work. But we’re taking our time, I want to vet potential franchisees and find people who are truly passionate about the business.
Get Your Dairy On:
Website: https://churngetsme.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/homemadeicecreamandcoffee
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/churn_homemade/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/churn_homemade
Interview by: Eric Pursh