I visited Austin, TX recently and found a great local eatery, OneTaco. Taquería, when I was out for a run. I'd never heard of it before, but I knew immediately that I had found something special. There were a few initial signs:
- the line was LONG but moved FAST,
- the line was full of VARIOUS kinds of buyers (construction workers, office workers, tourists, etc), and
- buyers were willing to STAND and eat in order to make sure they got their meal.
Clearly OneTaco. Taquería had something figured out about their constituency, and when I looked closer I confirmed what I initially suspected, they were a successful Austin food truck that had expanded their footprint locally to multiple brick-and-mortars over the course of the last number of years.
"Expand-local" is a model that lies close to the heart of some of the questions Elle Ramel and I are trying to understand at One More Store:
- What helps LOCAL stores expand intelligently and effectively in-place?
- How can ANY store leverage their LOCAL IDENTITY inside their business?
- Where do owners/operators go to BUILD on this kind of momentum?
We've been asking ourselves these questions for a little while now. What do you think?