ralia’s first self-scoop stores. It’s not uncommon in Europe, especially in Germany, where the founders and sisters, Eva and Maria Konecsny, are from. These little towns might have a gewürzhaus (spice house), and they sell teas and herbs and spices by the scoop, but they’re not really seen as a special experience; they’re a functional part of the high street.  When Gewürzhaus was founded, no-one in Melbourne was offering quality spices and considering it as a retail experience. We’ve built on that with our brand, and our stores are very much experience-first. We’ve put a lot of thought into our designs to highlight the spices.  When you enter our stores, you’re overwhelmed by different aromas depending on where you stand in the shop. We might have a tea tasting with a strong aroma; it might be a Christmas advent tea or a spicy gingerbread tea.  In retail right now, everyone is trying to engage the senses. Brands are pumping aromas into their stores with unique scents. Fashion brands are selling confectionery to add elements of it. But that’s a natural part of our brand — you can smell the spices, they’re in big beautiful tubs so you can see the colours and textures.  You can lift the scoop, smell the spice and get a good sense of the flavour through all those senses. We overlay it with sampling in our stores as well. Our brand engages all those senses perfectly. We think our products are really special and have a deep connection with people.  What we cook and eat is about nurturing. I’ve got three young boys and Eve and Maria have young children, so for us, it’s about considering what we feed our children. A lot of our products are designed around that too. Our number-one-selling product is the quick butter chicken mix. It’s a spice blend with no nasties in it. You can have a butter chicken meal in 30 minutes, and when you have kids in the house, a quick mid-week meal like that is great. When you go to an FMCG environment, trying to find a butter chicken on the shelf without preservatives or nasty ingredients is hard.  Gewürzhaus CEO, Grant Inches. Image: Supplied IR: What are your plans for the store network? GI: We opened in Adelaide Central Market in the middle of a pandemic, which was interesting because we had to open it remotely. No-one from the headquarters was able to attend, but we were able to send someone from Sydney from the brand.  Our first store in Melbourne was in Carlton, and then we’ve got stores at the Block Arcade and Chadstone Shopping Centre, then we’ve got South Melbourne and Queen Victoria Markets. In New South Wales, we’ve got the Strand Arcade and Castle Towers, then got the Canberra Centre in the Civic. Our brand is diverse in where it can sit and how it plays. There aren’t many brands that can operate in both Chadstone Shopping Centre and Queen Victoria Markets. They’re pretty polar environments. I think that’s one of our strengths. We can evolve the concept to work in a few different scenarios, which has proven to be a real strength.  All of our fit-outs are different. The way that we position the loose spices and corresponding jars is the same, but we consider every location individually, and we try to build the store that works best for the space. The Strand Arcade has a lot of brass, it’s a bit more special in that sense, whereas Castle Towers has a suburban design, so the fixtures are tailored to the environment. One of our stores in the markets is more rustic, with brick-like tiles and more of a market stall. We consider where our stores sit and make sure we tell the brand’s stories within the space. If you transplant the Strand store into Castle Towers, it doesn’t quite make sense. It isn’t easy operationally, because every store is a new build, but we’ve developed efficiencies with the layout as we’ve grown. It’s important every space is tailored to the market and corresponding stores. It has to hold up in its own location as well. IR: How is the business performing right now? It seems to be growing quite a bit. GI: We definitely are. We’re privately owned and plan for that to continue. Our growth is something that we’re doing at a steady pace. We don’t want to punch out 10-20 stores in a year and grow for growth’s sake. Our network is important, but e-commerce growth is important as well. We’re looking to grow geographically in Sydney, and we’re not in Queensland at all, so we have an opportunity there, and Western Australia will come. But our focus is on growing a sustainable business from every element. We don’t want just to grow a business, sell it and fall over when a bigger company takes over because it’s too complex. We want to grow a business that’s here for the long-term — that’s one to two projects a year, maybe three. The hero products at Gewürzhaus are the blended spices. Image: Supplied IR: How is your e-commerce looking? GI: In 2019, we set out to be more strategic with our e-commerce. Previously we were only selling our spices online, but not the merchandise. We set a lot of initiatives to get it done, including bringing fulfilment in-house. Previously we had a 3PL provider. It was good, but we were limited in terms of what we could fulfil.  We have handmade Christmas ornaments from Germany, some of which are worth $1000 apiece, so we want to make sure our e-commerce experience stands up, including creating our own warehouse and fulfilment.  We signed a lease for a warehouse in January last year, and then coronavirus came. We weren’t meant to move in until July, but we negotiated to move in early, and within 10 days, we took the keys, gutted it out, set up racking and the day after Easter, we started fulfilling for the first time. We had 350 orders on day one. We rushed it through and started our fulfilment in April, and since then it’s been remarkable.  Last year, our e-commerce was up tenfold where it was the previous year, it was going up 15-fold at times through Melbourne lockdown, but we’ve created many strategies to do that. Hundreds of products from our range are online now, and we’ve invested in our marketing.  But probably the other major thing we’ve done is launch our loyalty program. We’ve always known our customers connect with the brand, so we launched The Spice Club. It’s been live for a couple of months and membership is up to 15,000 already. It’s growing at 35 per cent every week at the moment. We’re probably a bit behind as a brand with that sort of stuff, but it’s great to know who our loyal customers are, and it’s helping our e-commerce platform. We see conversions in-store too. IR: What are some of the interesting consumer changes that you’ve seen in the past year? GI: We saw a big shift last year. People were cooking a lot more at home and continue to do so. We’ve started a cooking community on Facebook, and we’ve had some really great engagement. People are trialling different recipes, and overall, there seems to be a big movement of getting back to real food. The pandemic has given us more time than before. The concept of cooking pulled-pork is no longer something that you only do once. People are willing to experiment more and take more time to cook quality produce for friends and family. That’s really the core of what we do. We really want to bring people on that journey, to move away from stuff that’s not good for you and know there’s a product that can deliver a better result. IR: How would you describe the competitive landscape? You’re competing against major supermarkets, really. GI: Retail in any form is competitive in Australia or anywhere. For us, our offering is incredibly unique. We are the experts when it comes to spices. In terms of speciality retail, if people are considering cooking and spice is a part of that, we do quite well in that environment. When you go to another food speciality retailer, the spice section is reasonably big, but it’s hard to interact with them. They’re in packets; you can’t smell the product, you have no idea what you’re getting or if it’s any better than the product next to it.  At Gewürzhaus stores, you can talk to staff and smell the spices. We have 350 recipes on our site. Half our traffic is from customers looking to cook recipes. We do probably 60 recipes a month. That’s a part of our brand that we really own as well, and it sets us apart from the competition. That commitment to content is something that we’re investing in constantly. IR: If you think about it, there are so many spices out there, and if you don’t interact with them, you have no idea what to do with them or what they smell like. There’s not a lot of context or education. GI: Our store network is really important. We spend a lot of time training our staff; they get free spices every week. A lot of people in Australia don’t use a lot of spices, but once you start and learn how to use them, [your collection] grows. My pantry has 150 jars. Every single meal I cook, I use multiple products. It’s because I love them, but before working at Gewürzhaus, I barely used spices.  I think competition is there, but we have a single strong focus on what we do, and in that alone, there’s not a lot of [businesses] doing what we’re doing at the moment. We’re trying to own that, grow our network and provide value to our customer beyond the sale. Recipes and content are a big part of that.  It’s the freshness [of our product] as well. If you go into our store and smell our Dutch cinnamon, you’d go, “Wow, I had no idea it was meant to smell that way!” But when you buy from a supermarket shelf, it’s been there a while because the supply chain is long. We mix and mill our blends ourselves largely in Melbourne, which allows us to have that freshness.  You pay a bit more for our products than in a supermarket, but we sell A-grade cinnamon and sell 12 grades. What’s on the supermarket shelf is not the same.  IR: What are your plans for Gewürzhaus this year? GI: We recognise Gewürzhaus can be challenging for Australians to pronounce, but we want to improve our brand awareness and our store network needs to grow more to do that. In Adelaide, we’ve had an incredible response. In places like Brisbane and Queensland, we think we’d have many customers there as well, and WA would love it, so we want to increase our footprint and national presence. With that, we’ll follow it up with a strong digital strategy to grow the brand in those places as well. We’ll also continue to create good content for people to engage with.  We’re doing a lot of product development. We had six new spice blends last year. We launched a ‘no nasties’ version of chicken salt in February. That was an outstanding launch with such great feedback. We’re trying to develop these products that we all know and love but that aren’t so great for you. We’re trying to find a way to do it that’s natural without questionable ingredients.  Chicken salt is something we all grew up with at the local fish and chip shop, and we love it, but a mass-market product is loaded with MSG, and it might taste great, but it’s not good for you. We used kelp, pennella and sesame seeds and combined it with salt and garlic, which emulated the flavour you get from a mass-market ingredient product. The spice blends are our bread and butter; it’s what we do best. We source the best, freshest single spices, but our blends are our heroes. The quick butter chicken blend it’s something that we perfected. It really takes the guesswork out of cooking. The customer just has to add onion, garlic, tomatoes and coconut milk and that’s it. The product development for us is largely done by myself and Maria.  I used to be a pastry chef, and I spent a lot of time cooking as a child with my grandmother. Maria and I also both have young families, so we’re home cooks, and we perfected a 30-minute butter chicken recipe so our kids could eat it, too.