The United Kingdom
Five shops and a roastery.
Five cafés in Bournemouth and Christchurch, opened in three years — the operating experience SUMLII carries into every overseas conversation.
The arrival
Bournemouth, by chance.
Adam and Abdul Gaffar left their father and family in Malawi and moved to Bournemouth. Both were born in London but had never lived in Britain. They arrived as Commonwealth citizens and set to work.
MARAVI CAFFE HOLDINGS LLP was established in April 2021. Supply lines, warehousing, equipment, furnishings and a shop design suited to British tastes were prepared before the first door opened.
The timeline
Pilot, then proof, then expansion.
- April 2021
MARAVI CAFFE HOLDINGS LLP is formed and preparations begin: supply lines, warehousing, equipment, furnishings and a shop design suited to British tastes.
- September 2022
The first pilot café opens.
- Three years
Five cafés trading in Bournemouth and Christchurch under the Maravi name — the ten-year Malawian programme compressed into three.
- The roastery
One of the five is a café and coffee roastery, supplying the others and selling coffee to other UK vendors.
The numbers
What the pilot has shown.
All five cafés in Bournemouth and Christchurch are described as profitable and trading at or above the group’s minimum target of £1,000 a day in takings.
That target was set deliberately. A café has to pay rent, staff, coffee, milk, energy and everything else before it pays its owner. A daily figure that clears those costs with something left over is the difference between a nice idea and a business.
The next step is to open the Maravi franchise to the British market, using the pilot records, the site criteria and the operating system the group has built.
The family had spent about ten years building cafés and bakeries in Malawi. Doing the same five times over in three years, in a new country, was the proof that the knowledge travelled with them.
Roasting
A café with coffee at its centre.
The café-and-roastery combination is the part of the model that cannot be copied easily. It links the group’s green coffee buying to the cup in the customer’s hand, and gives the business something to sell beyond the door.
Maravi’s existing UK website presents hand-roasted coffee in Dorset and a range of Malawian coffees, including Geisha microlots. For SUMLII, the question in a new country is which parts of that combination to keep and which to adapt.
Next stop
Why the conversation turned to Spain.
Holiday homes, British visitors and a market that lives outdoors for much of the year.