zaterdag 17 november 2012

Paard van Troje: a victory trophy for the bookshop market

We like laptops. We couldn't live without the internet. We want smart phones. We live through Facebook. We have tons of cyberfriends. It's cosy out there. But there's just one thing Facebook seems to be missing. It doesn't smell like paper. It doesn't feel like a brand new page. You can't write a note in it and give it away to someone. It doesn't fill your walls at home with beautiful, poetic, sad or intriguing titles. It's not a book.

We like books. A lot. At Paard van Troje Bart Van Aken and his wife Annelies Joos do too. In just a few years time they managed to make quite some people forget about Fnac and Standaard Boekhandel. And they're the main reason why we are happy the Billy bookcases at Ikea are so cheap.



THE RABBITS: Paard van Troje is quite an interesting name for a bookshop. Did you want to surprise the book market?


ANNELIES JOOS (Paard van Troje): We have been looking for a good name for quite a while. During a conversation with a friend (we were talking about the preparations for the bookshop) I said we could enter the bookshop market “as a Trojan Horse”, when she suddenly said: “that’s it!”. However, nowadays Paard van Troje is more a concept or a notion than a name with a specific meaning.




THE RABBITS: Why books? Do you have a literairy background?


ANNELIES JOOS: No we didn’t study literature or linguistics at all. It’s more Bart’s story. We were in Nepal, thinking about the future, when we got the idea. Bart has worked at De Kaft (in Leuven as well as in Ghent) and has been collecting books for a long time. On the other hand he’s very into music as well and has worked at a record company. When the music industry collapsed he either wanted to have a bookshop or a restaurant. He did work at a restaurant for a while but that was physically very hard. So "something with books" it was and Paard van Troje was born. Bart has a very large affinity with books as a product, while I’m more of a reader. Bart also has an incredible mental archive around books: authors, titles, availability, etc.




THE RABBITS: Is Ghent the ideal city for Paard van Troje?

ANNELIES JOOS: Any city is a good location for a bookshop, but in Ghent we have a very mixed audience from very different sectors. A bit of a willful, quirky public too, that has the guts to want and do things differently and wants to discover new things. This is a good breeding ground for us to try out new things and people really appreciate that. To give a concrete example: we don’t separate books because they are somewhat different than mainstream. Everything is mixed up and put together. Sometimes people ask where the Top 10 lies or where they can find “the new books”, but they’re everywhere, next to the other books. That’s how people can discover books they don’t know. We avoid categorising as well; one day we got a request to put a pink shelf in the shop for the “holebi literature”. That was too ridiculous for words.




THE RABBITS: How did you know you were ready for adding a coffeebar to the shop?

ANNELIES JOOS: We already started it at our previous location in the Volderstraat, but there it was very limited. We saw a lot of customers who appreciated they could have a coffee while reading a book so we thought we could give it a try here at Kouter. At first we considered serving food as well but it was safer to start small and see how things would go.






THE RABBITS: Were you inspired by foreign bookshops where a coffee bar is often included? Did you do somekind of market research first?

ANNELIES JOOS: Oh no, we never did market research or whatsoever. That’s not our cup of tea. We both approach things in a very intuitive way, you see. Anyhow I would like to emphasize  we are a bookshop where you can drink coffee as well, instead of a coffeebar where you can read a book.




THE RABBITS: How come you changed locations?

ANNELIES JOOS: Our previous location was a bit too "heavy" from a financial point of view, certainly with respect to the financial capacity of the bookshop.



THE RABBITS: You are very close to bookshops such as Standaard Boekhandel and Fnac. Is that a challenge?

ANNELIES JOOS: We were and still are the only independent bookshop in the city centre and it has a lot of success, but we need to work hard. Our clientele is very different from Standard Boekhandel, but very much alike with the Fnac customers. Nevertheless we can distinguish ourselves by giving personal advice for example. Bart is definitely the best person to ask for advice, except for children's literature perhaps, which is more my territory, together with contemporary literature.



THE RABBITS: Do you get a lot of reactions and feedback from customers?

ANNELIES JOOS: Yes. We recommended “Valse papieren” (Valeria Luiselli) a lot and got very positive reactions, while Knack only wrote a “moderate” review on it. Some of our customers also ask for a specific person in the shop because they know they have the same taste. But the other way around we also get tips from customers. Customers who read international newspapers for example. Or customers who order a cerain book of which we think: “Hmm, we might offer it in the shop as well”. And I have no problems with admitting that sometimes we have to change our opinion about books we didn’t order because we thought it wouldn’t work out.




THE RABBITS: How do you deal with the inevitable paradox of promoting your bookshop and books as a product via digital channels such as websites and social media?

ANNELIES JOOS: First of all, our website doesn’t contain anything more than the contact details of our bookshops in Ghent and Leuven. A lot has to do with the fact Bart is not a “digital person” and I don’t really have time to spend on it. A second reason might be that we both don’t really see the point of having an extended website: we still don’t have the feeling we should do anything more with it. Anyhow, from time to time we do get orders in via the site because certain people absolutely want a certain book and then of course we're willing to send it to them. But we feel it’s not our strength so we don’t expand it. 

On Facebook however we have been active since more or less one year and I have to admit: it pays off very well. We announce events, arrange give aways , post quotes, etc. We get a lot of positive reactions to it and we even have to be careful we don’t forget to announce the same things in the shop itself. We might not have a newsletter but our fans can follow everything on Facebook.




THE RABBITS: Do you give books as a Christmas present?

ANNELIES JOOS: Yes, in the end we are running a book shop. So we do give a lot of books, but not to people who don't like them. It’s a nice challenge to get the right book for the diehard readers in our social circle: something they don’t know yet.




THE RABBITS: Do you have a favourite book?


ANNELIES JOOS: (Silent during a couple of minutes, thinking about what to answer) No. Books are very much related to a moment and a place. The books I found incredible ten years ago don’t necessarily mean that much to me anymore now. It also depends on my mood what I take from the bookshelf. And books are so different amonst eachother. It’s both very hard and useless to pick just one. 






zondag 11 november 2012

C is for Coffee / OR Espresso Bar


When opening the door of OR Espresso Bar you are not just walking into a coffee bar, you are entering a coffee world. A world where taste is criteria number one, where cappuccinos are styled to please the eye, where everything and everyone breathes a great respect for this delicious black gold. It might be a challenge to find a free spot but we can guarantee it's absolutely worth it. While Katrien Pauwels runs the coffee bars in Ghent and Brussels, her husband Tom Janssen is in charge of the OR Coffee roastery. Get ready for an intense coffee experience.



THE RABBITS: OR Espresso Bar is much more than just another coffee bar; it’s a concept.

KATRIEN PAUWELS (OWNER OR COFFEE): True. Our two coffee bars (one in Ghent and a quite recent one in Brussels) are the most visible part of it, but we have a shop in Aalst as well and a coffee roastery in Westrem, which is the very heart of OR. Today we have a training room over there as well and are allowed to give official barista trainings. Knowing we were just delivering coffee to restaurants in the past, OR has changed a lot. And I think that’s our strength: we always try to go further. Roughly speaking we could say my husband is in charge of the process from choosing the right beans to the roasting of them; after that I take over.



THE RABBITS: So if we understand correctly you are very close to the original product.

KATRIEN PAUWELS: In the past we bought coffee beans via traders and the more traditional circuit but four years ago we started to go to the country of origin ourselves as much as possible in order to do business with the coffee farmers directly. I must admit it takes a lot of time and effort building up these networks and keeping them alive, but it’s very satisfying and rewarding as well.



THE RABBITS: Does this way of working imply there’s an ethical aspect involved?

KATRIEN PAUWELS: Yes. Sometimes we get the question: “Is your coffee fair trade coffee?” In that case I reply it’s probably more fair than having a fair trade label on it. The easy way is to buy coffee with a fair trade sticker on it, but it’s an idea we cannot identify with ourselves. Tom and I started from a passion which we had to transform into a commercial concept we would be able to live from. The most important thing for us is the taste of the coffee beans and that is what we constantly keep in mind when picking the beans. Coffee farmers involved in the “official” fair trade concept get a minimum price for their beans, but then again, they cannot get more than that either. We don’t want to work that way. When visiting coffee plants in Honduras for example, we want to know the quality of their product, the maintenance of the plants, how they treat their people. We see it with our own eyes. In the case of Honduras we eventually selected 2 plants of which we really had the feeling we were on the same level. In June we even invited these farmers over to Belgium, they stayed at our place and we showed them our Belgian coffee culture. Because the funny thing is, they are doing business around coffee but have nothing with consuming it. We grabbed the opportunity to organize a coffee evening to which our customers were invited and where they could ask their questions directly to the farmers. And you know what? The same coffee farmers will now start their own coffee bar in Tegucigalpa for which they ask our advice. This is a good example of a win-win situation and a very pleasant collaboration.

We currently have a project in Guatemala and I’m going to Rwanda in March 2013. We try to add one country per year to our list.  



THE RABBITS: Why coffee? Have you always had some kind of interest in it?

KATRIEN PAUWELS: I didn’t. I drank coffee, but I knew absolutely nothing about it and I never really thought about the process behind it. It actually was my husband Tom who really wanted to run his own coffee roastery. His father and grandfather had had one and I think there was some kind of nostalgia involved. When we were traveling through Asia for a year, the idea started to move. But it wasn’t that obvious: no one was waiting for coffee, it wasn’t extraordinary. Therefore we wanted to bring our coffee in a very different way than people were used to. We first started the shop in Aalst where we had a small coffee roaster. Little by little we had to develop our vision. When traveling in those days we noticed that abroad, coffee was served in a very different way than we did in Belgium. In Ghent you could order a regular coffee or a cappuccino, which back then was nothing more than a regular coffee with whipped cream on it, and to go with that you could choose between a waffle or a pancake. There wasn’t really a quality idea connected to it: people didn’t care about the beans or the value of the product. That’s what opened our eyes. Before starting our coffee bars we were delivering coffee to regular restaurants but they didn’t seem to feel the value or quality of it as we did. We realized the production process didn’t match with the serving process. That’s when we wanted to serve our coffee in a way we thought it deserved to be served. 



THE RABBITS: How important is this specific location to you?

KATRIEN PAUWELS: Before stepping into the world of coffee, I used to work for Apple. Ten years ago there were no Apple stores in Belgium and I was involved in starting them up in our country. I had to look for locations and appropriate premises, ask for prices etc. What I learned from that period is that a good location is crucial: young undertakers often decide to go for a B-location because the difference in price is considerable, but the profitability simply cannot be compared to the one of an A-location. When I was looking for a location for the bar I actually came to sit here a complete day to count the people passing by. There’s an economic model according to which you can assume that 1% of all passengers will enter your shop so you simply need a lot of passengers. Since we sell a product that costs between 2€ and 3€, the bar has to be full every single day.



THE RABBITS: In what respect does your current location influence your clientele?

KATRIEN PAUWELS: Our clientele differs according to the day and the time. During the week we have the ones who want to have a coffee on their way to work in the morning. In the afternoon we see more students since university is very near. During the weekend we mainly have the hard working dual-earner couples who want a qualitative weekend and come here to slow down, have breakfast, read the newspaper, etc.



THE RABBITS: Does that mean you have less tourists coming in?

KATRIEN PAUWELS: We have few tourists, and it’s not really the kind of customer we are trying to reach either.  The least pleasant period to work here is Gentse Feesten, because then we get people in who ask for a Gini or a Coke (which we don’t even have) and who don’t understand the idea behind it. Moreover they are not interesting customers from a business point of view: they never come back and they don’t appreciate our product. I would never consider having a bar at a touristic location.



THE RABBITS: And if we see it a bit bigger: why Ghent?

KATRIEN PAUWELS: According to us three cities were ready for our idea: Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent. We don’t feel much affinity for Antwerp but I did like Brussels. Nevertheless, since Tom has his roots in Ghent we decided to start here. And 7 months ago we opened our second bar in Brussels.



THE RABBITS: Do you have concrete plans for the future?

KATRIEN PAUWELS: Yes, but not under own management. There was for example a company that came to us and wanted to copy-paste the OR concept in other cities. And although we were very flattered, we refused their offer. It’s impossible to manage fifty coffee bars maintaining our current quality level. The bars in Ghent and Brussels will absolutely stay, but we refuse to expand horizontally, having to lower our standards; I simply would not be able to live with that.

What we do offer is help and advice to young starters who want to open a coffee bar. We are willing to look into their business plan and check the feasibility of their ideas. We even want to share our own financial plan. 



THE RABBITS: That’s a noble thing to do; not many people would do so.

KATRIEN PAUWELS: A lot of people ask us why we would want to share all our knowledge with people we don’t even know, but for me that’s a very conservative way of thinking. Of course there’s a possibility someone will make abuse of it, but that’s a risk we’re willing to take.




Pictures: OR Espresso Bar Facebook Page

zondag 4 november 2012

Cargo Vélo: fast as a bullet, loaded as a truck

Ghent is undoubtedly one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world. More and more people are using their bicycle and they have good reasons for that. The bicycle turns you into a privileged road user: you don't loose any time being stuck in traffic jams, you can cross one way streets in all possible directions, you don't have to search nor pay for a parking spot and at least until people will have their own helicopters, in the historical centre it must be the fastest way to go from one point to another. So why not use this magical mean of transport for local logistic services? Flits Fietskoeriers started with bicycle transport in 1999, but since October Ghent and its citizens have another bicycle courier service at their disposal. Meet Sander Vandenberghe who is training his leg muscles for Cargo Vélo.



THE RABBITS: Let's start with the basics: what is Cargo Vélo exactly?

SANDER VANDENBERGHE (Founder Cargo Vélo): Cargo Vélo is a bycicle courier service in Ghent. The idea was to transport larger and heavier goods by bike. Bicycles can carry more than people think!


THE RABBITS: Did you have to buy special bicycles or did you adapt regular bikes?

SANDER VANDENBERGHE: I use existing transport bikes. The one I'm riding today is called the Bullitt and is produced in Denmark. It's designed to both look good and can carry up to 150kg. I have another one called the Truck, an Austrian model designed in Vienna which can carry even heavier and larger objects because the platform is situated in the rear part.


THE RABBITS: When did you know: this is what I want to do ?

SANDER VANDENBERGHE: The idea has gradually grown with my passion for bicycles, biking, cycling holidays and trips, etc. We go on a cycling holiday every year and our destinations became more adventurous every time: Denmark, Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, Central-America. After I finished my studies I became an academic researcher at the university of Ghent and I truly missed the dynamics and "normal" interaction with people. I missed doing concrete things and seeing results immediately and I had been walking around quite some time with the idea of "doing something with bicycles".  At first  a couple of friends and I started the Bike Kitchen (a bicycle repair initative) together but in the end that's nothing more than a hobby. After finishing my doctorate I had to make a choice: would I go for an academic career or would I try to create something out of this bicycle idea?

Anyhow, I had been talking to so many friends about my ideas that I was more or less obliged to take some action.


THE RABBITS: We saw on your website that everything started with a trip from Vienna to Ghent, by bike of course.

SANDER VANDENBERGHE: Yes. More or less five years ago I completed the Erasmus program in Vienna. While doing academic research afterwards I went back to Vienna one week per year. That's where I learned more and more about bicycle initiatives. They had a Bike Kitchen over there, which we now brought to Ghent. And I also learned to know people who offered courier services by bicycle.


THE RABBITS: When did you launch Cargo Vélo in Ghent?

SANDER VANDENBERGHE: Until the end of September I had another full time job so only now I can fully concentrate on Cargo Vélo. Officially it's still a secondary occupation but the goal is to be able to do it full time in the future. I'm also working together with an experienced partner: Flits Fietskoeriers owned by Kristof Kesteloot. I have worked for Kristof as a taxi cyclist during Gentse Feesten and he has a very wide range of transport or cargo bicycles. In October we have done two large projects together: the delivery of a fair trade breakfast to the city services (using seven to eight bikes) and the delivery of sandwiches to the electoral stations. For both Kristof and I this was a new challenge: it took us quite some planning, organizing and preparation.


THE RABBITS: Who can call you and what for?

SANDER VANDENBERGHE: Private individuals, companies, everyone! Currently I'm mostly working together with small companies or other initiatives. Sometimes I work for individuals but rather indirectly, e.g. when delivering paint for Tintelijn (ecological paint distributor) the customers pay Tintelijn for my service.

Anyhow, you can even hire me for moving your furniture: I moved a freezer, a table, chairs and even a banana plant before. I can deliver your Christmas presents at home! Snow is not an obstacle; there are winter tires for bikes as well and it will go a lot smoother than a van that has to cross the city.


THE RABBITS: Do you have to take into account certain "road rules" or weather conditions?

SANDER VANDENBERGHE: I try to avoid cobblestones, as well as tramway tracks and roads in bad condition in general, especially when loaded. Sometimes the bicycle is loaded with hot meals or fragile objects so I need to be careful. But rain, wind or snow aren't stopping me!


THE RABBITS: We suppose you get a lot of positive reactions. Nevertheless that often doesn't mean people are also using the service. Are people willing to pay for it?

SANDER VANDENBERGHE: Well, we still have too many vans crossing the city and people are changing their minds: perhaps we can do this in another way? A van can transport more volume but often needs as much time as a cargo bicycle going back and forth a couple of times. So in the end, the delivery and delivery time will be exactly the same. Anyhow, transport is not an easy sector either: it should be just in time and should cost as little as possible. My prices depend on the distance, not in kilometers but in city zones, as well as on the weight of the goods. And the prices are rather low compared to the rental rates for vans.


THE RABBITS: Which zones are included in your service?

SANDER VANDENBERGHE: It's mainly Ghent and its outskirts: Sint-Amandsberg, Gentbrugge, Ledeberg, Sint-Denijs, etc. And for now that's far enough. A couple of days ago I biked 110km during one single afternoon.


THE RABBITS: What are your plans for the future?

SANDER VANDENBERGHE: I believe in cooperative entrepreneurship, so perhaps there might be a cooperation around cargo bicycles? The current cooperation with Flits Fietskoeriers is  rather informal so we might get it more organized in order to transport even larger and heavier things. Intercity transport is another option. In Switzerland for example a certain bicycle courier brings your goods to the railway station, they are put on the train to another city and once they have arrived another bicycle courier picks them up to deliver them at their destination. Courier service is of course only one of many options: in Brussels for example there is a bicycle service that repairs your bike at home.

We already have a lot of people applying and sending in requests to come and work for Cargo Vélo, but currently it's impossible to employ other people. It's still a challenge for myself to reach a break-even point with Cargo Vélo, but perhaps in the future, who knows?


If Sander convinced you and you really believe in Cargo Vélo, feel free to support his initiative  and make a donation through Ministerie van Ideeën, where Sander is Minister of Transport Bicycles.


www.cargovelo.be

www.facebook.com/cargovelo

www.ministerievanideeen.be



Pictures: Koen Degroote - Lucien Bogaert - Sander Vandenberghe