“Freshly baked brownies and homemade gelato – how can you go wrong with a combination like that?”, is exactly what cousins Kyriakos and Panikos Panayi thought when they decided to go into business together. Bannos Brownies opened its first store at the newly revamped Westfield Miranda in Sydney three weeks ago, with a second to open at Wollongong Central in the NSW Illawarra later this month. “There hasn’t been a timeline put in concrete, but we’re proposing between five a
and 10 more stores for next calendar year. They will be Sydney-based at the moment, but there are plans to go throughout Australia,” said Kyriakos Panayi.
Bannos Brownies offers a range of 36 brownies, and depending on store size, has between 16 and 24 gelato flavours on rotation.
The Miranda store is a 25sqm kiosk with seating for five, whereas the Wollongong model will be 70sqm with indoor and outdoor seating.
“The Wollongong store will be double in size in terms of display compared to Miranda. It will have double gelato, but the brownies will just have more display space.”
The cousins are both pastry chefs with more than 20 years experience in retail. Kyriakos co-owns Christopher’s Cake Shop, and Panikos owned a chain of stores in Cyprus.
“We had spoken for many years about doing gelato and brownies, and the opportunity came up at Miranda so we put the concept together and that was pretty much it.
“We used our years of experience in pastry and our understanding of the market, and what we thought the market would like to see and just gave it a go,” he said.
The stores are designed to create a feeling of driving through the countryside and coming across a pop up store in the middle of nowhere, Panayi told Inside Retail PREMIUM.
“We used recycled timber, it’s been cleaned up and reused. Then we used crates to create a really organic feel, because the product is really raw.
“Everything is a scratch mix, even our gelatos are a scratch mix, so we wanted to create that organic feel about both the store and the product.”
