John Neman: Physical retail stores are Sweetgreen's best customer acquisition channel
John Neman · 20VC: Sweetgreen Founder Jonathan Neman on Leadership Lessons from Managing Through COVID, The Importance of Failing Fast and Iterating & How the Best Leaders Bring Together Brand, Capital Allocation and Strategy · Jan 26, 2022 · at 20:53
John Neman, co-founder and CEO of Sweetgreen, discusses the role of physical stores versus digital and dark kitchen channels in customer acquisition.
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“We find it to be incredibly important. And as it's our best customer acquisition channel, what it does is it's, there's no better way to really illustrate what we're all about than a retail... You know, it is by far our best acquisition channel.”
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More from John Neman
Neman: Sweetgreen Store Density Increases Average Unit Volume Instead of Cannibalizing Sales
“Where most restaurants, the more stores they put in a region, the stores will cannibalize themselves. For us, the more stores we put in a region, they actually all grow. So the average unit volumes grow because our customers become more frequent.”
Neman: Sweetgreen Can Scale to 6,000 Locations in the US
“I like to remind myself, you know, we have a 150 restaurants. We can have probably five or 6000 just in the US. So all of these new ideas that sometimes we get excited about, just think about it, like if we just scaled our core business alone, the opportunity …”
Neman: Sweetgreen Will Become the McDonald's of Its Generation
“We started building restaurant two and three, and really started to lay the foundation for what we believe will be the McDonald's of our generation.”
Sweetgreen lost its entire executive team shortly after Neman became CEO
“Imagine I become CEO four years ago. Within three months, the whole executive team is gone. We're sitting there almost running out of cash and trying to pivot the company and wondering, like, are we suited to do this?”
Neman: Sweetgreen Targets Store Payback Faster Than 3-Year Industry Benchmark
“We shoot for significantly higher than that, and I think what allows us to do that, and the reason our return on capital has increased over time, has largely been the efficiency of the boxes due to our digital investment.”
Neman: Legacy retail stores cannot simply retroactively add digital experiences
“You cannot take an old retail store and add the digital experience on it. We've thought from a digitally native way, not just about how to build the technology, but I think what people lose and people forget about this is you actually have to think digital fir…”