This edition is about that “one thing” from the last chapter—Fensterccino. Yes, you already know that Fensterccino is a coffee drink that sits right between a macchiato and a cappuccino in terms of coffee-to-milk ratio, and we serve it in a waffle cone coated with premium Belgian chocolate. How it first got on our menu is a story I’ve already told—back then I promised to share what happened to it later on. Well, here it is. Just a little delayed.
Fensterccino was added to our menu for one single reason—to grab attention. Nothing more, nothing less. It was my answer to the question: why should someone walking by our window stop here and try our coffee? This was my “attention magnet.” I never expected to sell lots of Fensterccinos or for it to become our main product. No. It was meant to be a visual hook. Someone would notice it, step up, order their usual coffee, and walk away enjoying it, already thinking about coming back. That was the script. But things didn’t go the way I thought.
Let me rewind a bit. At the very beginning of the project, I realized I needed Fensterccino. I found it, brought it into our stock, tested it—it worked. I printed it on the menu: “Fensterccino – €4.50” (back then it had a different name, but we had to change it after a patent conflict with one of the food giants). That was it. And… nothing. I was selling maybe two or three Fensterccinos a day. That was nothing but a fiasco. An Italian word, but it fit perfectly.
So I thought: “What’s going on here? I’ve got this amazing coffee in a crazy-cool cone, but nobody cares!” And then it hit me. Of course people walking by had no clue I was offering this miracle. No one was going to figure it out from just the name on the menu. If I had written “Free vodka,” maybe it would have worked—but “Fensterccino”? No. So, after a couple of months, I grabbed a friend from a nearby shop, handed her a Fensterccino with latte art, snapped a picture, printed it on a 40×40 cm plastic board, and hung it next to the menu. That photo stayed there for years. And suddenly—it worked! Sales jumped from 2–3 a day to 10–20. Almost 10 times more.
But that wasn’t all. About a year later, in the summer, a popular Instagram influencer from the Gulf saw that photo, ordered a Fensterccino, apparently liked it, and that was the spark. Suddenly hundreds, even thousands of tourists from the Gulf started coming in for coffee. That drew the attention of other influencers, and the momentum took off. From that point forward, slowly but steadily, we grew to selling several hundred Fensterccinos a day. It worked! But… did it work the way I had wanted?
Now let’s talk about the concept. Yes, along with Fensterccino sales, the sales of other products like espresso and cappuccino also grew. But little by little, Fensterccino overtook them all—not just in revenue, but eventually in number of units sold—becoming our undeniable best-seller. That wasn’t the original plan.
So we ended up with a situation where what started as a “promotional” product turned into the main, profit-generating, budget-driving one. And that meant only one thing: the old concept wasn’t the one that really worked. Our customers had reshaped it for us. We became “the Fensterccino coffee shop” that also serves regular (and still specialty) coffee. The shift in the product-to-customer relationship redefined the whole concept. Which meant that, for the new concept to work effectively, we had to change everything that created it: operations, team setup, machines, menu, social media communication—everything. But I only fully realized this now, in August 2025. Sure, I had noticed along the way that we were moving in a very different direction than I had intended, and I adjusted to those changes to strengthen what worked. But I treated it as “tuning” the existing concept—not replacing it.
On the way to this realization, I made plenty of mistakes—expensive ones that still cost us today. For example: building our own roasting and packaging facility. That was meant to support a deep, systematic development of specialty coffee. But we didn’t go down that road. We went to Fensterccino. That investment of over €300K turned out to be unnecessary. Same with about €150K on renovations and rent for a retail space for coffee beans and machines. Some of these investments still help us a little—for example, our roasting. Our in-house roasted coffee, both “regular” and specialty, is the best I’ve ever had. But it’s an expensive luxury we could have done without. Other costs, like the shop, were just written off.
At the same time, we brought cone production in-house. That process took a long time, but it was clear and inevitable. Previously, we ordered our cones from a company in Bratislava. We’d regularly drive over and pick them up ourselves. It was super convenient. Price was fair, quality was good. We didn’t have to worry about anything—just pay and collect. But over time, we realized we couldn’t always predict the right quantities. Sometimes cones sat in storage too long, and sometimes we ran out and needed more immediately. On top of that, our supplier often switched chocolates for their own needs—we were just a side client—and that wasn’t great for us. So we calculated that, at our volume, it was not only more comfortable but also more profitable to produce them ourselves. We bought a chocolate-coating machine, learned how to use it, found chocolate suppliers and a source for uncoated cones, and started production. For now, we don’t bake the wafers ourselves. The reason is simple: the cost of buying industrial wafers is dozens of times cheaper than producing them in-house. But we’re on the path toward baking them ourselves one day.
Looking at order trends at Fenster, I realized that specialty espresso was being ordered maybe 2–3 times a day, while Fensterccino was ordered 200–300 times. The direction was obvious. And at some point, it hit me—Fenster is no longer the place I originally imagined. It’s much better. And it now demands more of my focus and energy than it ever did in the beginning. My job now is to rethink everything—what’s been, what is, and try to predict what’s next. To figure out what will make Fenster even more successful and cooler. By the way, the latest turning point that clarified this new concept for me was something that had nothing directly to do with Fenster—and yet it led us to adding pastries to our menu. That story I’ll tell in detail later. For now—more about the concept in the next chapter.
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