Back in the Molly's-on-the-way-days of August 2010, we were invited to an informal meet-and-greet dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns.
I can say with 92.6% certainty that, soup-to-nuts (or perhaps better to say snout-to-tail because Sweet Jesus that ham...droooooool) it was the best meal of my life. I never knew raw carrots could taste like a thing you might order as an entree.
The gentlemen who invited us were the owners of Sweetgreen, a chain of healthy "fast-casual" eateries, primarily in the D.C. area thus far. The three recent Georgetown grads explained how they wanted to put on a yearly "Sweetlife" festival to build a brand that incorporated their shared serious love of music.
At Blue Hill, they were still thinking relatively small. By May 2011, the Strokes, Lupe Fiasco, Girl Talk and Cold War Kids hit the stage as the Sweetlife reached a whole new level. They shared their experiences with me for the November issue of Inc.
Rock out with your Cobb out.
HOW SWEETGREEN CONNECTS THROUGH MUSICHey, kids: Let's put on a show! What a music festival can do for your business.
(Courtesy Company)
Play "Freebird"! Blissed-out fans rush the stage at the Sweetlife Festival.
The latter may lack the cred of other popular music festivals, but that hardly mattered to the 15,000 or so fans who rocked out to the Strokes, Lupe Fiasco, Crystal Castles, the Cold War Kids, and six more acts at the Sweetlife Festival in May in Maryland.
The concert was the brainchild of Sweetgreen, a Washington, D.C.-based restaurant chain; it's also the centerpiece of the company's marketing efforts. Founded in 2007 by college friends Nicolas Jammet, Jonathan Neman, and Nathaniel Ru, all 26, Sweetgreen aims to offer an organic, locally sourced, and inexpensive alternative to the usual fast-food joints. It has 10 locations (eight in the D.C. area and two in Philadelphia), 250 employees, and annual revenue of about $15 million.
Music has been front and center for the chain since its earliest days, when the struggling founders boosted traffic by setting up a DJ booth on the sidewalk outside its first shop, in D.C.'s Dupont Circle neighborhood. The company also has its own Pandora station and considers Coachella a company holiday. In 2009, it held its first live-music event—a mini block party in the store's parking lot—with local indie rock bands.
The block party helped bump sales 20 percent over the previous year, so in 2010, Sweetgreen blew it out with the first Sweetlife Festival. The trio persuaded the popular electronic act Hot Chip—n town for a show at Washington's 9:30 Club—to play the restaurant's parking lot that afternoon. The event cost about $50,000 to stage and left the company about $15,000 in the red. But the owners deemed it a success: Nearly 1,000 people showed up, and the event generated plenty of buzz, including a mention in Spin.
(To read the rest of "How Sweetgreen Connects Through Music," click right here.)
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