Two of K&L’s four owners, Clyde Beffa and Trey Beffa, sold their shares in the business following Clyde’s retirement.
Brian Zucker and Todd Zucker, along with their respective spouses, each owned 25% of K&L. Brian Zucker said that with the new investors, his and his parents’ shares have been “diluted a little bit,” but that they still own a significant portion.
New investors are not controlling the direction of the business, Zucker said: “They’re not coming in to operate.”
Zuckers plans on opening new stores on what he called a “responsible” timeline. “We’re not going to open five locations next year, but we’re certainly interested in growing”.
TLDR: Seems like a positive evolution for the business for now.
Curious about the power split now that it’s not 50/50, but at least for the foreseeable future shouldn’t change anything.
Always liked K&L and miss it now that I don’t live in SF. Succession planning is a helluva thing for any family run business but most positive thing for me is that Brian Zucker is staying on. I met him a few times through the years and his passion and understanding of the business was very clear. Hopefully their new investors are aligned with advancing the family’s vision but otherwise don’t change too much of the business.
Interesting. Scuttlebutt is that the Hollywood location is in peril due to lease issues. As in they may not be asked to renew so some other development can happen there.
The Culver City location is good but its somewhat smaller than the H’Wood store.
The want to expand is interesting to me from the standpoint of the sort of business they are operating. Are they planning on broadening what they carry to include more corporate brands? Seems like it would be hard to keep filling stores with product given the kinds of wines a business like this carries.
An interesting comment. They certainly do carry less ‘mass market’ wines but still do carry plenty of wines that appeal to the masses - and their prices are great. And they certainly have a great spirits section, too.
I can certainly see them opening a few more stores with success - cautiously of course.
Not for Champagne and other wines I buy. I buy spirits from them as their whisk(e)y program is the best in the country since David OG took on a bigger role.
I’m a retail real estate developer. Their store locations are weird, especially Culver City.
I haven’t used it yet, but I think they will transfer purchases to their storage partner, Rare Storage (https://rarestorage.com/). Rare will transfer to a third party shipping carrier based on where you live. Not sure if you have already explored that route.
I wonder if it’s less about retail foot traffic and shop square footage versus an expanded supply-chain foot print and local presence.
Customers can shop online, have product safely transferred to store of convenience (for free in refrigerated trucks), and pickup a week later. That’s pretty appealing.
I get that. And their rent and other occupancy costs should be much lower due to location. LAWCO was a deep discounter that was in an industrial center; K&L’s location is closer (and not merely physically) to that than it is to any of Total Wine, Bevmo, Wally’s, Woodland Hills, and now Thatcher’s types of locations. More like Winehouse, who somehow makes their funky location and layout work (I also think Winehouse owns its building, which is a different structure altogether).
Grocery stores hate wine/liquor shops in shopping centers and the strong chains negotiate for exclusive booze sales. I’d think a store like K&L would do better in a retail location near a grocery anchored shopping center, but maybe the cheap rent makes up for those lost sales.
Yes, of course the rent plays into it. Spots like Wally’s (which is as much a restaurant as wine sales now) are different. Especially if a bunch of your sales are shipping (ala LAWine) and delivery. The overall geography isn’t bad given the Hollywood location. I live in Baldwin Hills Estates so the C.C. Location is along my route to a lot of places. Though I buy most of my wine at auction these days.
+1 here. I get too distracted when perusing in store. I much prefer to select what I want and transact online as long as the retailer can get it to or near me without using fedex/ups. So if the retailer saves on rent and in turn can deliver to me it’s a win win.
Same. It helps living in the UK where the shipping is just so much more wide open, online presence so strong, and offsite storage (via the “bonded” system) so cheap compared to the US.
Since moving here five years ago less than 1% of my wines have been purchased in store.
Yeah. I didn’t quite get the location for the Culver City shop. But we don’t know all the factors involved.
I’m no real estate person but I would think if the goal were to go for more distributed physically for the purposes of ease of order access that it would be better to go much smaller per store and in cheaper zip codes. Or in strip malls as you alluded to rather than stand alones. This model also bucks the modern trend of consolidation and delivery. It sort of pulls it inside out.
I just hope they stick around. The delivery between stores for pickup, even on auction bottles is a great service and usually very quick. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some sort of fee if the store count gets above some number.