One of Wichita’s three Reverie coffee shops is closing
Reverie Coffee Roasters owner Andrew Gough has decided to close one of his three coffee shops.
Friday will be the last day for his Reverie Roasters Cafe at the Kiva, the tiny satellite coffee shop he opened last January on the lower level of the Garvey Center at 250 W. Douglas.
Gough, who also has his main Reverie at 2202 E. Douglas and a little shop in the new Advanced Learning Library, said he agonized over the closing.
“It was a difficult decision for us to make, simply because we wanted to give it enough time to truly see what the potential was for that space,” he said. “But it never really lived up to the sales that we were really hoping for as a coffee business.”
Gough said that he thinks a food service business of some kind could thrive in 1,100-square-foot space, but coffee turned out to be not the right fit.
Business started to suffer late last year when Cargill moved from its spot at 300 W. First St. North, which is near the shop, to its new headquarters on the site of the former Wichita Eagle offices at 825 E. Douglas.
“We saw a significant drop in our sales, and that kind of made us really speed up the conversation,” he said. “We decided that instead of trying to invest a lot of time and effort and energy and money into beefing up a different model of our business, we wanted to point those resources back to main location and the library, which are both doing very well.”
The shop’s eye-catching peacock wall hanging, which was salvaged from an old iris growing business in Wichita called Peacock Iris Gardens, will leave the space with Reverie and may eventually find its way onto the wall of one of Gough’s other businesses, he said.
I’ll let you know when the Garvey Center finds a new tenant for the space.
In the meantime, you can read about the closing in more detail on the Reverie’s blog, which Gough writes.
This story was originally published February 27, 2019 at 1:33 PM.
.jpg)