🥂 District Champagne: A true story of commitment

"What if the right space for me isn’t out there?”

This question comes up on many First Location Program consultations, and most of the time, it’s super easy for us to answer. There are dozens of “right” retail spaces on the market at any given time that could work for a business, and, after all, you only need one. When you’ve got super clear real estate criteria, it’s typically pretty easy to find a handful of spaces that could work. Narrowing them down and 🕵️‍♀️ picking the best option is the hard part.

But for Pedal Retailer District Champagne, DC’s restrictive liquor license laws cut our options down dramatically. This is the story of how owners McLean and Joseph persevered to lock down their dream space despite a much smaller pool of potential spaces than usual. Honestly, it was less of a pool 🏊‍♀️ and more of a puddle 💦.

Why a puddle? The pool is full of all the spaces that are the right size, and in the right neighborhood, and within the budget. But for this business, we had to overlay the city’s rules dictating where new liquor licenses can be issued, and they looked like something this:

• 🙅‍♀️ You can’t be too close to a school or a rec center
• 🙅‍♀️ You can’t be too close to another liquor store with the same license type
• 🙅‍♀️ You can’t be within a long stone’s throw of a grocery store
• 🙅‍♀️ You can’t be near an historic pigeon habitat 
• 🙅‍♀️ You can’t be within earshot of anyone named Kevin

Okay, not the last two, but you get the point. Pool ➡️ puddle.

So why were McLean and Joseph willing to put on their waders and get to work?

District Champagne is both a very good business proposition AND the realization of a dream. Both partners have had long careers in the 🍷 wine industry, and when they moved to DC several years ago, they were struck by the absence of a go-to destination for interesting quality wines in the region, especially because of DC’s special “gray market” status that makes it much easier to import and sell a greater variety of wines than most of the rest of the country. Over the years, they just couldn’t believe no one was 💸 seizing this opportunity, and they slowly realized that they were the ones to do it. They were also clear-eyed about how DC’s liquor laws would limit their options from the jump, which helped them manage their energy and expectations through the long process.

Of course, a great business opportunity alone isn’t enough to channel the resilience for a real estate process like this one. There’s gotta be 💓 passion as well, and McLean and Joseph have that in spades. Their dream of owning a business together – one that combined their talents for curating the perfect selection with genuine hospitality – helped them push through each obstacle.

And the obstacles were many. Take a look at the numbers:

14: Months from first survey to lease signing

15+: Spaces toured

5: Spaces we negotiated LOIs on

2: Spaces we went to lease on

1: Lease signed

All of these numbers are on the outer bounds of normal, especially for a retailer with such a strong, clear vision for the business. 

So, how did we ultimately do it?  In addition to good, old fashioned grit and perseverance, here’s how we compensated for our drastically reduced selection of potential spaces: 

 🕵️‍♀️ Clear customer profile

McLean and Joseph had a very clear idea of their target customer profiles. They understood how and where they currently buy wine, and what the existing experience was lacking. 

🥂Differentiated value proposition

Since the vision for District Champagne is fundamentally different from the competition, we weren’t overly concerned about any specific competitor. McLean and Joseph were confident in the value they could offer their customers, and so we didn’t need to further reduce the pool of options to avoid particular businesses. We were cognizant of competitors, but not concerned.

🏬 Simple, adaptable space criteria

The most important physical attribute the District Champagne space needed to have is easy loading – no one is interested in hauling cases of wine up multiple flights of stairs – but beyond that, McLean and Joseph were able to keep an open mind to spaces of various configurations and aesthetics, knowing they could adapt their vision to the space and vice versa.

📍 Openness to different neighborhoods

So long as we stayed true to the target customer, we were able to consider spaces in a multiple neighborhoods. In addition to instinct and market knowledge, we used Placer.ai to help us better understand the consumer profiles in each neighborhood. The five spaces we seriously considered were all in different neighborhoods, but all of them checked the right boxes in terms of accessibility to target customers.

Ultimately, we landed in a perfect space in DC’s affluent West End, surrounded by upscale residential buildings and luxury hotels as well as GW University. Despite super strong demographics, this neighborhood didn’t have any upscale independent liquor stores… until now.

So, if you’ve got real estate criteria that are difficult or limiting in some major way – like needing a specific liquor license – the best advice we can give is to 1) get as clear as you can on your other non-negotiables, and 🕊️ release the rest of the wish list and 2) make sure your brokerage team is prepared to stick with you for the 🚴‍♀️ long haul. A commission-only shop is probably not going to get you the outcome you need, since the more time they spend with you, the less profitable you become. And most importantly, 3) make sure you’ve got the 💓 passion to persevere because you’re going to need it!

District Champagne is opening this spring, and we could not be more excited to toast to McLean and Joseph’s labors! Cheers!