We took the plunge and signed the lease! Also, more delivery slots.
Amanda Teng
We have exciting news!
We took the plunge and signed the lease to the store at the Grandstand yesterday. For those who don’t know, Grandstand is a mall located in Bukit Timah and there are shuttle buses from Sixth Avenue and Botanic Gardens. Our store will be on the ground floor unit 01-15A, right next to the Thai restaurant. If you happen to be in the area, do drop by and say hi 😍.
This is a significant investment for our small business and a huge personal commitment, but we believe in our mission of serving you with everyday vegan groceries so that you can choose kindness, everyday.
We are very excited to commence with the fit-out of the interior and we aim to get as close to our vision as possible without destroying the bank account!
We want Everyday Vegan Grocer to not just be a place for you to shop for vegan groceries. Instead, I want to create a place where you can visit with your family and friends, sample delicious vegan treats in our Everyday Vegan café, browse our aisles packed with vegan groceries, and even join cooking demonstrations and educational talks. This would not have been possible if we focused solely online.
We have many challenges ahead.
First challenge, and I have been having sleepless nights about this:
Do we have enough time?
We want to complete the fit-out in time for World Vegan Day (1 Nov, Sunday), but this will not be easy. The contractors are telling us now that progress may be slow in the coming weeks due to limited manpower caused by COVID-19 control measures
Second challenge, costs!
Fitting out the interior of this space is very expensive. In fact, the initial estimates we received were completely out of our budget and I was close to pulling the plug on the project.
We were not going to let this compromise on our vision however, so we decided to do the interior design and renovations ourselves with a small start-up goodStudio. goodStudio was started by a friend of ours who have a lot of experience in renovations.
We both share the vision of building with sustainable materials and will be managing the project jointly.
While it means that the service charges will be low, it also means that the budget will constantly be moving as we find ways to improve on our build.
Third challenge is to fund the project.
Well, obviously we have earmarked some funds for the renovations (We are not that foolish! 🤪).
But what is going to be the key driver here is your support. To serve you better, we will be opening up more delivery slots. We will be trial-ing weekday afternoon slots, between 2:30 to 4:30pm.
It was your support that took us this far 🙏, and we hope that you will continue to believe in our vision and continue shopping with us.
The dream here is to make it so easy and accessible for people to shop for vegan groceries that we can all choose kindness, everyday.
Thank you all 🙏 🙏 🙏
Love,
Amanda 💚 🌱