Adam Sah was a Googler whose fiancée, Joyce Guan worked as a food broker, discovering artisan brands and shepherding them to the shelf at stores such as Bi-Rite, Rainbow and Whole Foods. Putting their heads together, they opened Buyer’s Best Friend, which began as an online specialty wholesaler that has since grown to three retail locations (the Haight, North Beach and the Ferry Building). BBF made its mark by stocking exceptional chocolates, olive oils and of course, the highly sought-after Stumptown Coffee. Plus, their liberal sampling policy resembles the world’s most permissive parent.
As the Haight Street flagship celebrates its first year in business, Eater sat down with Sah to talk about aesthetics and authenticity, how his tech background influences everything, and having to be taught to operate a cash register.
How did the idea for a retail store strike you?
Adam Sah: We opened the store because we’re the world’s largest catalog for wholesale artisan specialty food and personal care items. These days we work with just shy of 2200 brands and 127,000 items for sale. It’s a classic internet store. We use the internet to find these brands, who are looking to get found, and looking to get in the marketplace, and we connect them with buyers. Small buyers just register for themselves online and the large ones we find at trade shows. We work with everybody. Small independent markets, like Haight Street Market down the street, pick up brands that are here and vice versa. It’s classic “co-opetition.”
When 500 brands each send a box of samples, and it shows up in your living room, you have a big problem. November, a year and a half ago, I could watch the boxes coming into our house, and we have a Victorian six blocks from here, and used to put it on a piece of graph paper, and we were like, “Wait a minute.”
So it was, “Agh! Exponential inventory growth. We need space.”
Yeah, with each brand joining, we were going to be out of space. It wasn’t quite exponential, but strong linear. A friend suggested we open a retail store. I said, “Well, I don’t know anything about retail. I come from the tech world. Retail, I don’t want to touch that.” But the more we looked into it, the more we liked the idea, also from the tech world, of “Eat Your Own Dog Food. Live it.”
It’s the opposite of a drug dealer. You know, “Don’t do your own stash.”
Well, there’s a lot of authenticity. These are artisan brands. They join this out of passion, not to be the next Bill Gates or something. So we said, “Let’s just try it.” We had no idea this would be a success literally overnight. We’re sitting here in a store in the middle of the week, and there’s people here. There’s always people here. Normally, food businesses take decades to get traction, but this is a small-format store, it’s not expensive to open. It’s really about sourcing the products. The thing we didn’t know if it would work or not was if it would matter to consumers. But we’re the only business I know of that ran a Yelp Elite event and our average score actually went down, because our average score is practically perfect. [Laughs] Neither Joyce nor I had worked ever retail — not even in high school or college. We had to be taught by our own staff how to use a cash register. Talk about humiliating!
Even today, it’s been a year, and we run experiments all the time. For example, there was a big debate: do we do an open sign or not? [Note: they did.] Unbelievable, immediate impact, even though grocery stores don’t have an open sign and every restaurant does. And that’s the thing, are we a grocery store? Are we a convenience store? Are we a retailer? Or a boutique? The answer is we’re some blend of those things. We absolutely cherry-pick good ideas from each one, try them and see if they work for these products in this setting, and if they do, great.
Dare I ask what some of your failures are? We’ll move on to successes in a second.
Merchandising is the classic. We’re still struggling with signage. Fingers crossed, we’ve brought in one of the pros. I don’t want to name names, but she’s well-known in San Francisco. We didn’t even have a sign on the outside of the store for the first six months and I just heard one too many times, “I tried to find the store and I couldn’t find it.” OK, we’ve got to get a sign outside. Incredibly expensive proposition. You have to get five different parties to agree.
Another example is inside the store. Do you have shelf tags like a grocery store? Do you do it like a boutique and have something cute? I have no idea. We’re currently in a transition period, so what we have there right now is hopefully going to get upgraded one more time. You can’t make it like a grocery store because it destroys the gestalt of being a boutique, but if you do boutique, you just don’t scale.
And by asking for the price, you can be made to feel gauche, right?
Yeah. And in some settings, people know how much something’s going to cost. In this one, it’s artisan product. Nobody knows. A lot of people don’t care. So you have to appeal to all these different kinds of people. One of the things that’s tricky is that most boutiques can define their customers, but ours is anybody with a wallet and a stomach.
The thing that connects with everyone is samples. Normally, artisans have to pay to get retailers to sample out for them, but here we just offer it for free. We tell customers that you can taste or try just about anything before you buy, and people really connected with that. That’s been a consistent part since we opened and people love it. We’re now sampling so many different items that no one person could sample the store in one trip. It would probably take ten trips.
So it’s kind of like the Louvre. You can’t do it all in one day.
That’s correct. And yet, it’s not a big store. It’s just very densely packed.
How are the three stores different?
When we opened Haight Street, the feedback I got was very mixed. We survey our customers continuously, and they love us, but we brought in some food and retail experts, and they all pooh-poohed it. They said, “This Victorian setting, I don’t get it.” And we were like, “It’s kind of like a World’s Fair.” You know, a sense of discovery.
Which World’s Fair? Panama-Pacific 1915? Chicago 1893?
Now you’re getting specific! It’s turn-of-the-century Chicago, like the White City. That kind of evoked the concept — plus we live in a Victorian from 1891, so I know where to get chandeliers and stuff. It was relatively easy for us to do this kind of style and it’s very consistent with the Haight.
But for the second location, which was North Beach, everybody wanted us to be more explicitly Italian. At the same time, the ceilings are not as tall, so you can’t hang a chandelier from an eight-foot ceiling. We decided to do something more traditional-retailer: white walls, bookshelves instead of wire racks. Some people said it looks more like a Williams-Sonoma. People love that layout as well, but Haight Street is still the most successful store.
What about the Ferry Building kiosk?
You don’t get as much choice. Every square inch counts. We love the Ferry Building and from what we can tell, the Ferry Building loves us. It’s extremely expensive real estate but the actual people you work with are the sweetest people in the world and they are super-careful to be super-authentic about local artisan products. They are very persnickety. The proposition of BBF — which was a gamble, and mind you we’ve only been open for six months — is that we’re an aggregator of artisan goods, and we’re really different from the people who make the product. They’re very different sets of skills. When it comes to pricing and promotions and merchandising, already we know way more than the manufacturers do about how to make their products appealing to customers. And when you compare the results, we do a better job of selling their product than they do, actually. And if you stop and think about it, of course it’s not a surprise. The person who writes software versus the person who sells software — they don’t look the same, they don’t act the same, of course they’re different people.
You’re really talking like a Googler now.
Yeah! But why shouldn’t it be? The idea that you simply take a product and set it on a shelf is just completely wrong. There’s a tremendous amount of value to be created in the shopping experience, more than the experts we brought in would have thought. You have to be very good at moving a lot of inexpensive physical objects around all day long.
From here, do we expand the retail concept in directions that are not necessarily aligned with wholesale? You’ll notice that we don’t sell refrigerated sandwiches. We don’t have any of the permits for full-service, but if someone were to come in, place them in our refrigerators, sure. We’ve done a few tests, like Home.Sweet.Flowers comes in and we’ve helped her find other accounts.
Are there plans to expand to more locations?
Yes.
In San Francisco or beyond?
Both. Of course in San Francisco, because once you’ve set up three, it’s relatively easy to do more. We depend on the good graces of the neighborhood and casual foot traffic, because so far, these stores are not destinations on their own. So we can’t be in an out-of-the-way place. Plus, tourists really love these stores.
But if tourists love it, it really is a destination.
Well, yes, but it takes years and years for tourists to hear about you enough so that when they come to the city, you’re on a list of things to do. Plus, when I think of a destination, it’s “I’m going to make a special trip to that place.” Best not to fool yourself into thinking you’re a destination if you’re not. I’m grateful to my neighborhoods and communities because they’re the ones who support us five days a week, although throngs of tourists in the summer are terrific. We’ve managed to walk that fine line where it’s authentic to both. If anything, we’re on the side of being more authentic to locals and if the tourists don’t necessarily get it, too bad, because the other 364 days we’re going to be supported by the neighborhood.
So of all your 2200 brands, which are your absolute favorites?
That’s like asking which child I love the most.
Sophie’s Choice, Adam. Or at least, what are the customers’ favorites?
The balsamics from Italy, definitely. They come in six, eight, twelve and twenty-five years. Emmy’s Pickles. Teatulia. Overall, we love any novel things that aren’t just a commodity. Or anything you have to try in order to buy.
Suck the Rainbow 