Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1817
Luneurs is a combination of French LUNE (moon) and EUR (suffix “者”), which means “people who come from the moon”; the Logo consists of a new moon and a full moon, symbolizing their two star products, croissants and spoons style ice cream.
The brand deliberately eschewed fancy options when designing its initial menu—the first store menu included four flavors of ice cream (caramel sea salt, dark chocolate, mango, vanilla), nine types of bread, a few drinks, and just So many.
On a smooth surface of dark marble, nine breads of the day are lined up, each exquisite. After the customer chooses, the clerk will take one from the kitchen, wrap it in a thick paper bag, and give it to the customer.
When looking for the first storefront, the four partners of the French bakery Luneurs spent nearly 6 months before they found a secluded commercial block in Shanghai, “Xingfuli”. This street was newly developed at that time, and its location was very remote.
Luneurs’ store is hidden in the block, and it takes a long walk to find it from the intersection, but there are people queuing up soon after it opened.
“Everyone asks me, why did you come so far?” CEO Yan Xianxin said. He has a baby face, a mint green polo shirt and khaki pants, and his hair is neatly combed. In fact, they couldn’t afford to rent a more lively place, and the market didn’t know this new team.
Four years later, that is, last year Luneurs left Shanghai for the first time and opened the most profitable shopping mall in Chengdu, Chengdu International Financial Center (IFS). IFS almost left the best position – next to the “wall-climbing panda” where tourists rushed to take pictures and check in – to the brand.
Luneurs Shanghai Xingfuli Store
Luneurs Shanghai Hengfu Art Center Store
Luneurs Chengdu IFS Store
In just five years since the opening of its first store in June 2018, Luneurs has stood out in Shanghai’s fierce ice cream and bakery market.
By 2022, Luneurs will open 18 locations, including four locations that serve full meals. Outside of Shanghai, the brand has opened its first stores in Shenzhen and Chengdu. They plan to expand the number of stores to 25 this year. In August, Luneurs will open its first store in Beijing.
The original creator of these breads was Didier Chouet, who won the MOF French national best craftsman and baker category in 2007. In Yan Xianxin’s words, he is a “world champion”. The MOF is France’s highest award for artisans of all stripes. In the first half year of the opening of the Xingfuli store, customers looked through the glass window as if they were stars watching several bakers quietly making bread in the kitchen. Among them, the oldest one was Didier Chouet.
Didier Chouet has 25 years of experience in making bread. When four young people from China approached Didier and asked him to customize bread recipes for a new bakery, he agreed because he was “curious about the Chinese market”.
“Looking for Didier can bring three things.” Yan Xianxin said, “Traditional formula and taste; training the team and raising their standards; giving us brand confidence.”
“We didn’t have a big publicity, but at that time, everyone could see him making bread for us in the store.”
Didier Chouet discusses the bread recipe with several partners
Bread and ice cream convinced customers. For several years in a row, Shanghai’s gourmet media “Penguin Eating and Drinking Guide” released the Luneurs of the annual Shanghai Ice Cream Awards.
It focuses on French ice cream. Compared with American hard ice represented by Haagen-Dazs, French ice cream uses more custard when making it, mixes less air, and has a firmer and finer texture.
With the increase of stores, Luneurs’ bread is still made in the store’s kitchen, and the croissants are only sold within 2 hours. To make ice cream, only use a small ice cream machine of 15-20 kg, because the small container will make the taste more uniform when stirred. The number of such machines has now increased to 20.
The most popular ice cream flavor is caramel sea salt. Anne Catherine Guilloux, ice cream chef and co-owner of Luneurs, was born in Brittany, France.
“I grew up on caramel and salt, and this taste is a souvenir from my childhood,” she said.
Caramel sea salt is a classic flavor, but Anne adds caramel chip cookies, another childhood snack, to the ice cream. The superposition of two classic sweets creates a unique rich taste, just like the front and back notes of a perfume.
At that time, there were already a number of ice cream shops in Shanghai offering new and unique flavors, but the flavors served by Anne were common.
Ice cream chef Anne Catherine Guilloux has no background in the catering industry. She followed her husband to work in China when their daughter was just born. At that time, Anne taught herself how to make ice cream. At first, she made ice cream for herself. Because the taste was good, a friend came to her and asked her, “Can I buy it from you?” She started making ice cream like this.
She remembers that when she was a child, her father’s homemade ice cream always had simple and clear flavors such as vanilla, chocolate, strawberry or caramel, but because of the sufficient ingredients and careful production, it always had a rich and creamy taste. She wants to get that experience back.
On a commercial level, the combination of ice cream and bread avoids the problems that come with the seasons. At the beginning of its establishment, Yan Xianxin noticed a small gap in the Shanghai bakery market at that time: there were many bakeries and ice cream shops, but there was no shop that sold both categories at the same time, and they were all handmade.
“Both of us have to keep it, and both of us have to develop our own formula.” Yan Xianxin said. Luneurs ice cream cones are also made in-house rather than purchased from a vendor.
At the beginning, Luneurs’ ice cream balls were known for their “large quantities”. 20 yuan for a ball, 30 yuan for 2 balls, and they are as big as a small fist. A single ball weighs 80 grams or 90 grams elsewhere, and their standard is 110 grams. (However, after the epidemic, they raised the price.) The raw material cost of Luneurs accounts for 25%-30%, while the usual level in the baking industry is generally around 15%.
Soon, Yan Xianxin received invitations from many shopping malls. In order to fend off some investment managers who came to consult, Yan Xianxin even hired a Frenchman as the expansion manager. In addition to trust and ability, one of the reasons for this appointment is that the Frenchman does not speak Chinese and can help Luneurs virtually filter out collaborators who do not take them seriously.
In 2020, Yan Xianxin met with more than 20 investment institutions who came to him, and most investors were surprised by the speed of Luneurs’ store opening.
“They said, you should open 300, 3,000 stores, so that you can increase your profits.”
At the beginning of this year, Yan Xianxin saw that some young brands in the baking industry collapsed due to excessive expansion, and decided that expansion should be cautious.
“We spend a lot of time building a brand instead of opening stores, opening stores, opening stores.”
Want to be a guest “Third Time”
When Luneurs trained employees, they found that the biggest “difficulty” was teaching employees to treat guests correctly and let them say “hello”, “thank you” and “goodbye”, which was “harder than teaching them to make bread”.
Yan Xianxin is French-Chinese and grew up in France. When he and his partners came to China, the most unaccustomed thing is that the convenience stores or restaurants here often “no one says hello”, as if they don’t welcome customers.
They put the requirement to say “hello”, “thank you” and “goodbye” to customers as the first item in the Luneurs employee training manual.
The temperament that Luneurs presents to consumers today: classic products, a practical and elegant store style, and a casual and relaxed consumption atmosphere are largely determined by the temperament of the four co-founders.
They are all French. Among the four, Yan Xianxin, CEO, and Kenny, who is in charge of supply chain and operations, are both in their early thirties, while Anne, who is in charge of product development, and Son Quach, who designs product lines, services and experiences, are both in their early thirties. teens. “We’re kind of like mom and dad and two little kids.”
In 2018, Yan Xianxin called together three friends around him and founded Luneurs together. “It’s been a stroke of luck for us – instead of one person doing a brand, we’re four.”
From left to right: Yan Xianxin, Anne Catherine Guilloux, Son Quach, Kenny Souksamrane
Son Quach is a Vietnamese-French, and customers generally call him “flower arm man”. Like Yan Xianxin, his parents run a restaurant in France. When they were twelve or thirteen years old, the two had already said “hello, thank you, goodbye” in French to the guests in the restaurant opened by their parents. The store was too busy, so they helped to serve the food. They are second-generation immigrants, their French is better than their parents, and sometimes they help translate the French menu.
“We were born in this industry.” Yan Xianxin said with a little pride. He knows many young people working in catering in China, most of whom are “the first generation of catering”.
transparent kitchen
From the first store, Luneurs’ kitchens are all open for customers to monitor. Every song played in the store is paid for music copyright, “everything must be formal.”
In order to choose songs for the playlist in the store, they built an eight-member WeChat group called “Playlist”. When group members hear good songs, they will forward them to the group. Every season, the store will change the playlist, and the music style is a combination of pop, hip-hop and rock.
From the very beginning, Luneurs has paid great attention to the sound experience in the store. They hope that the experience in the store is comfortable and relaxing. Therefore, the volume of background music will be louder than that of Starbucks, which focuses on business people.
The decoration design of each Luneurs store is different, but the style remains the same. Stores usually use a large area of warm-colored materials, paired with practical stainless steel plates or rough stones, and place green plants to provide a warm feeling. This type of design isn’t unusual today, but unlike most trendy restaurants, Luneurs paid particular attention to acoustics in order to create a “zero-stress” environment.
In the Huashan Road store in Shanghai, the name of the store is “Luneurs Community”. The overall concept is to provide community residents with an intimate and quiet social space, and they provide comfortable seats for customers to chat.
In order to reduce noise and allow customers to hear the music, the entire ceiling is made of sound-absorbing materials after entering the door. These 200 yuan per square meter panels can reduce the noise in the ordering space. Green plants are placed in the corridor, and the innermost private space has sound-absorbing materials on the walls.
Luneurs Shanghai Huashan Road Store
They pay attention to every detail in the store. When choosing ice cream paper cups, Yan Xianxin wanted to use environmentally friendly materials. So he found a supplier who was only exporting at that time, and the other party produced a light yellow bamboo paper cup, which was very beautiful and suitable for the theme of the moon. The cost of this cup is several times more expensive than ordinary paper cups.
The architectural design firm Onoaa Studio was founded in 2019. Penn, one of the partners, said that in the recent cooperation with Luneurs, they will receive a clear reminder of the store atmosphere: it may be a scene map of a family workshop, or it may be It is a complete PPT, and it may be a French proverb: L’été arrive, et la vie devient facile-meaning “summer comes and life becomes easy”. In store design, this proverb means sufficient light and ventilation, so that the indoor environment can be connected with nature, making guests feel relaxed, like a summer vacation.
Penn summed up several key words that the Luneurs store hopes to bring to customers: community culture, craftsmanship, craftsman spirit, regionality, relaxation and warmth.
Shanghai ASE Store
In the design of several recent stores, Luneurs will combine some Chinese elements with a more relaxed atmosphere.
Shanghai Guojin Branch
The brand has distilled the slogan, “Every gram is joy” (grams of joy). Yan Xianxin quoted Starbucks’ famous third space theory in the interview, Luneurs want to be the guest’s “third time”, meaning An easy place to go at home or after work.
“The style of Luneurs is elegant, but not the kind of pretentious elegance, but a natural and relaxed elegance.” Yan Xianxin said, “We hope that when people think of the Luneurs brand in their minds, they will think of ‘I am not here. Work, I want to take it easy, I want to slow down.’”
Make a universal product and do it well
Luneurs only has 12 new products a year, and this month is a new flavor of ice cream, and the next month may be bread.
From the very beginning, they decided to only provide simple and classic products to restore their daily experience of living in France: “After school at 4:30, we would immediately go to the bakery to eat a croissant or ice cream.”
When discussing product direction, the team often says that it is not a bad thing to make “universal” products, and “universal” does not mean mediocre, it may be “good-looking and durable”.
During the development of ice cream, Luneurs rejected a large number of “special” flavors. Not long ago, they tried to make the flavor of onion into ice cream. The team thought it was delicious, but they still worried about customer acceptance and did not adopt it.
“Universal” does not mean that nothing remains the same, but that it is adjusted and optimized in the classic formula. Take butter as an example, “What we need is the butter that really has a milky taste.” Kenny, who is in charge of the Luneurs supply chain, explained that foreign countries are very particular about different baking ingredients, and there are even more than 100 different flavors of cheese.
If a certain type of bread is not sweet enough, Luneurs’ solution is not to add sugar, but to replace it with a sweeter butter.
After 5 years of operation, they found that Chinese consumers prefer sweets. In the past, Luneurs’ bread used salty butter, so they plan to upgrade the bread of the old product line in the near future and fine-tune the ingredients in the recipe.
“Some people ask, why do you want to make 2.0 on an old product instead of a new one? Many people think this is a waste of time, but for us, to make this kind of common (product), put It does a good job.” Yan Xianxin said that they hope their products can be down to earth.
This summer, some customers reported that their ice cream is easy. They explained that it was mainly because of the hot weather and heavy passenger flow, and the product itself did not have too many additives. Luneurs improved the structure of the store’s freezers and retrained employees “how to scoop ice cream” to slow down the melting rate.
Luneurs plans to open stores in China’s first-tier and new first-tier cities in the next two to three years. In order to meet the increasingly tight manpower, this year the company established a training center led by Son and Anne to train employees from scratch. It takes 2 months for a barista and at least 3 weeks for a baker to work in a store from not being able to do it at all.
“When I was young, I told my parents that I would not be able to work in the (catering) industry. It was too hard. In the end, I did catering.” Yan Xianxin said.
The team loves to tell these little stories about themselves. Their experience living in France is that those century-old shops have their own little stories as a starting point—for example, an old man opened a shop because he was allergic to something, and it lasted for 100 years or more. They also want to create that feeling, rather than “a few young rich second generations opened a trendy store”.
“We’re here five years from now because we love doing it. And we’ve been very happy for five years.”
An employee of Luneurs shared his happiest working moment, “watching customers eat big mouthfuls”. He also noticed that the sparrows around him became round and cute because they ate too much bread crumbs.
“LatePost” launched a weekend edition, hoping to expand its sights to all kinds of creators. To put it simply, we want to know who is creating and using it to influence the surroundings; we not only look at the present, but also look back at the past, looking for the source of shaping today’s world; we pay attention to technology, business, history, humanities, and look at the Emergence of the Interchange.
What we pay attention to may be a product, a store, a packaging design idea, or a certain work philosophy, product concept, management method, or an interesting and novel way of life, even today. Glorious old thought.
“What has been created is insignificant compared with what is yet to be created.” Those were the words of Victor Hugo — and we hope Late Weekend confirms that.
This article is transferred from: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1817
This site is only for collection, and the copyright belongs to the original author.