Michael Shafran was a journalist with a passion for bagels, a passion that is innate in him as a New York native.
“[Us] New Yorkers, we’re quite passionate about our bagels,” Michael explains. “We know we make the best bagels in the world, and we expect them to be decent.”
So when his work took him to Australia, Michael soon began to crave a bagel. He had no expectations that the bagels would be as good as those in New York but, he said, he had at least hoped that they would be “edible”.
However, he ended up feeling disappointed and angry. The bagel shops he went to in Bondi were not even on a passably good level. Some suggested he make a trip to Perth or Melbourne, which they said offered better bagels, but Michael would have none of it.
“I’m pretty sure no one necessarily knows how to make proper bagels,” Michael said in frustration. “Let me try to do research and try to see if I can make my own bagels. I’m sure I can do a better job.”
Making his own bagels…and his own business in the process
In these early days, Michael would spend time reading 50 different bagel recipes and playing around with them. He also connected with bagel makers back in New York and even worked with them for a few hours to have a better grasp of the craft. With the knowledge and experience he gained, he began making his own bagels, which he first shared with his friends.
At that time, Michael was making bagels as a passion project, as his journalism career was in full swing. But after 12 years, amid a string of cancelled journalism-related projects he was supposed to do, he decided to start building a business around his bagels.
“Rather than waiting for other people to greenlight my projects, I’ll just do my own thing,” Michael explains. “Let me do a pop-up to see if anybody else cares about proper New York bagels.”
Initial struggles and breakthroughs
Brooklyn Boy Bagels would set up its first store as a pop-up location in an old bar in Darlinghurst. Initially, it attracted a huge queue that ran up to two blocks but the novelty would soon wear off and it struggled to attract new customers for a while. Michael decided to market the business in farmers’ markets.
Considerable growth soon followed but Michael admits it was not enough, as at that time, the business had only one wholesale customer. “When you have one wholesale customer, that’s a lot of work for not much,” he explains. “It was really hard at the beginning, not busy enough to keep staff around consistently. I’d say the first seven years were miserable.”
Apart from staffing, Brooklyn Boy Bagels also was having cashflow issues; debt collection took up most of the business’s time that could have been spent growing the business. However, things started to turn around as the company set up a new system for payments.
Through working with a company called Ordermentum, Michael was able to implement an automated payment system for the business, which allowed it to receive payments at the onset rather than be owed payments for the next 30 days. Micheal says, “If we make something now, we get paid to make it, rather than making it and trying to collect afterwards. That made a major financial change in the business.”
Another pivotal moment for the business came at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. On one front, Brooklyn Boy launched its own website to continue serving its customer base, who could no longer go to their café. At the same time, it also set up pop-ups in different locations and resorted to only selling coffee for some of its café customers who could not cook anymore.
Addressing the persisting challenges
In spite of the successes the business has achieved, Michael still experiences challenges in running Brooklyn Boy Bagels. For one, staffing remains a key issue, although the business has added some personnel and is now able to move people around to cover for someone who is absent from work for the day.
Cash flow is also something of which Mike has to be constantly mindful. “If you’re in a tiny margin business and hospitality, sometimes you make 0 per cent, sometimes you make 10 per cent, a lot of times you’re only making 5 to 7 per cent,” he explains. “Because labour, wages, and cost of goods are constantly changing, we basically need to be on top of that all the time. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money.”
As part of that revenue strategy, Brooklyn Boy for a while brought its products to supermarket shelves, which helped Michael keep and/or re-employ some of his staff during the pandemic. Eventually, however, he decided to pull out of the supermarket space. “We were working really hard for very, very little return, so we’ve kind of pulled back on that,” he explains.
A sense of quality and authenticity in identity
In promoting Brooklyn Boy Bagels, Michael has always been proud of the quality of the bagels he is offering. “If it ain’t boiled, it ain’t a bagel,” says one of the business’s taglines. “It’s not like McDonald’s makes the best burgers in the world. Success and quality don’t always go hand in hand,” he says. “But I’m a quality guy, so I can’t mass produce something in a way that I don’t like.”
A provocateur of sorts, Michael has injected this trait of his with a dash of New York boldness to take the business’s marketing efforts to the next level – all without sacrificing his and the business’s authenticity. This type of authenticity can be seen in Brooklyn Boy’s social-media campaigns, such as the one that stated, “When you’re in New York, don’t do this with a bagel – don’t spread your cream cheese like Vegemite.” Michael was purposely looking to rile up Aussies who love Vegemite, and he has no regrets about doing so.
“It’s my strategy. I think people like authenticity,” he shares. “People like the fact that we don’t really censor ourselves much. New Yorkers should be a bit proud and a little bit outspoken.”
This ties into another unique characteristic of the business, its unapologetic New York identity that it is proud to wear on its sleeve, so to speak.
“I say, ‘We don’t just sell bagels – we sell New York,’ ” Michael says.
For him, it is all about delivering an authentic New York experience through bagels without becoming a cliché. As such, he allows room for some creativity and employs strategies that would not necessarily do well in New York, while keeping intact the New York character, not only in the bagels but also in its other products, like sandwiches and drinks.
Plans for growth
As for the future, Michael says he is determined to grow the business more after a period of keeping things stable. “We’ve sort of held steady this past year [because] I wanted to get more systems in, for staff-management training, tech systems, etc,” he explains.
He’s also careful with the pace of growth Brooklyn Boy Bagels plan to undertake. “I’ve seen businesses too often grow too quickly and implode, and I don’t want the quality to go down,” he shares.
This article first appeared in issue 48 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
