One of the most important questions for any business is this: What’s your concept?
Let me explain briefly what I mean by that. Your concept is the answer to three key questions: what you’re selling, how you’re going to sell it, and who you’re selling it to.
If you don’t have a clear concept, you can’t define your direction or your goals.
As someone my age, with my interests, I need to know that.
Which means I have a concept. And Fenster does too.
Now, a concept isn’t just something you define once at the store level.
You also need one for the entire business, especially if your business is more than a single location.
So, at minimum, you need two levels of concept.
Right now, let’s talk about the first level—
the concept for Fenster Café, the coffee shop I opened on Fleischmarkt (Griechengasse) in Vienna.
I’ve touched on this in earlier posts, but today I want to break it down and organize the core ideas a bit more clearly.
So here it is, the original concept for Fenster, since 2017:
Great coffee to go – fast, tasty, affordable, and just a little unexpected.
From that, everything else follows:
Menu:
- Only coffee and coffee-based drinks
- Beans from both “mainstream” and “specialty” markets
- Drinks range from classic to signature styles
- No food. No snacks. No distractions.
Operations:
- Card and digital payments only
- No tables. No patio.
- No public restrooms
- Custom ordering and payment system
- Speed is everything – prep and service are lightning-fast
- Service? Friendly as hell
Equipment:
- Top-tier gear, specialty-grade
- Rock-solid reliability
Ingredients:
- Best-in-class quality. Period.
Target customers:
- Coffee nerds
- Local office workers
- People who live in the area
- Tourists
Now here’s the part that really matters:
When I opened Fenster, I did it from a deeply personal place.
I built it for the coffee geeks, the connoisseurs, the espresso freaks.
That’s why I invested in elite, AAA-class coffee equipment—machines that could brew the most delicate, gourmet-level extractions.
Not just because that gear made amazing coffee (which it did),
but because I believed that when someone walked up to the Fenster window and saw those machines…
they’d get it. They’d order something worthy of that setup.
And then—because these people always have friends, followers, family—they’d talk. They’d tell others.
Their opinion would be our best advertising.
That’s why I spent so much time and money experimenting.
I was pulling 90-second shots at low temp and low pressure on a Sanremo Opera with integrated scales and real-time pressure profiling—just for the two or three people who cared.
That’s why I bought rare and expensive specialty beans 99.9% of people have never even heard of.
That’s why you wouldn’t find Brazilian coffee on our menu. Not even close.
And back then, I had the time for that kind of work.
Fenster was built for people who knew coffee.
And the goal was for them to spread the word.
And even though we only served coffee, the menu was designed like a “coffee supermarket.”
Something for every taste (well, maybe not instant 3-in-1).
That’s what made adding the “Fensterccino” possible—it looked like just another menu item,
but in reality, it was our way to slowly shift people toward real, good coffee.
Now here’s the twist.
A lot of people were impressed by our machines.
But here’s what I noticed:
Very few of those people actually knew anything about coffee.
What caught their attention was the design, the lights.
They could feel that the machine was expensive—and it really was—but that’s not the impression I wanted to leave.
That’s not what I meant to highlight.
And that started to change the way I saw what I was doing—and who I was doing it for.
Eventually, about a year and a half in, something happened:
A social media influencer from the Gulf happened to stop by, tried the Fensterccino, and loved it.
Soon their followers started ordering only that.
And just like that, the concept shifted—only a little.
But that little change?
We’ll talk about it in the next post.
Leave a Reply