Twin sisters Jen, left, and Sara Wetmore own and run the Jinks Art Factory, Toronto’s only café/tattoo shop hybrid. Unique spins on the classic coffee shop are becoming more common as business owners attempt to find a way to stand out in the city’s oversaturated market.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
There aren't many cafés in Toronto where you can get a tattoo with your morning coffee.
That's what twin sisters Jen and Sarah Wetmore were counting on when they opened Jinks Art Factory, the city's only tattoo-café hybrid, on Queen Street West four years ago.
"Just opening a café, it's difficult now, they're a dime a dozen. They're everywhere. You really have to work hard at drawing people in," Sarah explains as she readies Jinks's coffee bar for her afternoon regulars. At the counter, a tattoo client sips a drink, waiting for Jen to finish a stencil: a small black acai tree that will soon be etched into the back of her neck.
While the tattoo-coffee pairing is unique, the Wetmores' business strategy is becoming a near-necessity in order to stand out in the city's oversaturated café scene.
Toronto was hit with a first wave of indie cafés in the early 2000s when baristas, inspired by the U.S. West Coast's artisanal coffee culture, began opening small, local shops that treat coffee as an art form. The market has grown since then, with 292 new café openings in Toronto since 2006, according to city data. Today, there are about 557 locally owned cafés here. Factor in corporate giants such as Starbucks and Tim Hortons, and Torontonians have close to 12,000 coffee shops to choose from.
Hybrid establishments represent the latest boom in places to have a cuppa, such as Snakes and Lattes, which opened in 2010 as the city's first board-game café. It now has a second location, and 13 other board-game cafés have opened in the GTA.
There's also Espresso Cycles, a High Park North coffee shop where you can get your bike repaired. Paint Cabin in Leslieville also functions as an art bar, with art workshops and supplies. Oaks 'n Acorns on the Danforth is one of many family-focused cafés in the city, where parents who need a caffeine boost can bring their children to spend time in the playroom. Then there is Tot the Cat Café at College and Spadina, which offers a "cat room" that is home to multiple adoptable felines from the Toronto Humane Society.
"When I look at some streets, sometimes I think, 'Can that street really take another coffee shop?'" says Vida Radovanovic, owner of the Canadian Barista & Coffee Academy, a school on Avenue Road near Wilson where aspiring café-owners take classes (costs go up to $1,450) on how to open shop.
Walk through neighbourhoods such as Kensington Market, Leslieville or Queen Street West and you'll see what she means. You'll encounter 12 different coffee shops while walking just 730 metres along Danforth Avenue between Greenwood and Coxwell. Kensington Market, with an area of just a few square blocks, boasts about 24 cafés, most of them locally owned.
The only way for many new café-owners to survive in such a saturated market, Ms. Radovanovic says, is by offering something your competition does not.
That edge used to be as simple as making the perfect cup of coffee (or espresso or cortado or triple-venti-soy-no-foam-latté). But this can be a tall order as coffee culture grows and consumers become more passionate about what they drink.
It can also get expensive.
High-end espresso equipment, including an espresso machine, a water-softener system and an espresso grinder, can cost up to $70,000. And that's in addition to a drip coffee-maker, a bar, refrigeration, a cash register or point of sale computer and a blender, among other essentials. The average amount spent on opening a shop is around $80,000 to $90,000.
The Wetmore sisters say they spent about $90,000 opening Jinks and had to renovate the shop's space in an old office building. To save money, Sarah made the café's counter and benches herself and borrowed furniture from family members. She even labels the coffee cups herself, signing "Jinks" in swooping handwriting on each cup during slow moments behind the counter.
Still, the café-tattoo parlour went through difficult times in its early stages. The sisters lost their home and had to move in with friends until business began to pick up.
"When we first opened," Jen says, "we had to incorporate both businesses because I only had a small tattoo studio out of my house and a short client list. We knew I wasn't going to be tattooing every day, so we needed something else to help supplement the income."
"And if we'd just opened the café, there's so much overhead that comes with it," Sarah says. "There's so much that goes into one cup of coffee: the cup, the sleeve, the milk, the beans – everything costs a little bit, and then your coffee only costs three dollars."
Tattoos – Jen charges $100 an hour, with a minimum charge of $80 – constitute the high end of what Jinks offers, in order for the two sides of the business to even out on the balance sheet.
Maximizing revenue was a key part of the business model for Boxcar Social, a café-bar opened in 2014 by John Baker and three co-owners. They now have two locations, in Summerhill and Riverside, serving coffee but also an extensive menu of wine, beer, whiskies and charcuterie.
"Our vision was to create this entity that's open all of the time," Mr. Baker says. "If you're paying rent 24/7, you want to generate revenue for as many of those hours as possible. But you have to have an equal balance of being good at both coffee and alcohol. If you end up doing one poorly, it will reflect poorly on the rest of your business."
Even hybrid coffee shops based on unique concepts aren't guaranteed to survive the Toronto market. Roll Play Café, a board-game coffee shop near Yonge-Dundas Square, became Roll Play Bar – minus the games – late last year. Around the same time, a two-storey Starbucks in Leslieville – with a rooftop patio, walls decorated with local street art and shelves of free books for reading – closed its doors. Kid-friendly cafés have also suffered, with Lil' Bean n' Green closing in 2014.
"Some [hybrid cafés] do extremely well when they combine two concepts," Ms. Radovanovic says. "But others struggle with an identity crisis."