Vanessa and Mike Duncan sitting inside the Nest installation (Image: Elizabeth MacLeod)
Rogue Coffee has much to celebrate with the official reopening of its cafe this week and with a new art installation marking the occasion.
Owners Mike and Vanessa Duncan asked their close friends Jade and Nathanael Muller, who designed and built Rogue Coffee, to come up with a unique installation where people can sit and enjoy their drinks and the atmosphere.
“It seems to be most of our creative ideas are out of necessity,” said Mike.
The “Nest” installation and alley are helping Rogue to maximize its space and foster a community feel while following COVID-19 protocols and social distancing.
“We were like, how do we get an all-weather installation, because really all we have is the alley to play. It’s just very difficult to do permanent things like there’s fire marshal issues, there’s alleyway concerns,” he said. “We’re always talking about what kind of crazy idea can we do.”
Rogue Coffee staff (Image: Elizabeth MacLeod)
The Nest offers small weather seating and fits in perfectly alongside present and future installations on Grannan Street. “We’ll make use of these kind of black wall areas. We did kind of throw an idea out there to Third Shift Gallery to find an artist to do something,” Duncan adds. “We’ll do another neon installation inside of here.”
They are working on two more Nests to be installed around the city with locations to be determined.
Rogue Coffee’s new opening hours are 9:30 am to 5 pm, Wednesday to Saturday. “We’ll adjust as things go on too; we just need to really be as business-minded as we can with trying to control our expenses and with some like traffic uptown right now it just makes the most sense,” he said.
The coffeehouse, now barely three years in business, had to think on its feet to keep business going. During the provincial shutdown, Mike and Vanessa made coffee deliveries, with their daughter doing her homework in their car while making their runs, pivoted their shop online and stayed in the social conversation by starting up a TikTok account.
“The community just rallied behind us for sure,” he said. “It was unbelievable to see us get so busy with that.”
Being selected as one of three New Brunswick recipients of The Canadian Business Resilience Network’s Small Business Relief Fund, out of 1100 applicants and the sole recipient from Saint John, is another step forward.
The Relief Fund came in the form of a $10,000 grant, with the winners announced, June 29.
“I think our story was a good one to tell and something that we can just be proud of,” he said.
Rogue Coffee pop-up window (Image: Elizabeth MacLeod)
The opening of the Atlantic Canada bubble and potential tourists is eagerly anticipated. Duncan estimates summer tourists made up 60 per cent of Rogue Coffee’s revenues in the last two years and got them through each winter.
“In the 2018/2019 summers we had incredible amount of tourists, and we’re not talking just cruise ship tourists,” Duncan recalls. “There were just so many people coming through Saint John and not just through in a day. They might have been on their way somewhere else or this was their final destination, but even if they were going somewhere else they were spending days and nights and making Saint John part of their trip.”
Both Mike and Vanessa are focusing on preparing for the lower volume winter period. “That’s why we want to really make the most out of the summer, and going to the winter as well equipped, as well prepared, as smart as we can to try to ride it out,” he said. “We’ve always faced challenges head on, so here we go again.”
