Loungers, the Lion Capital-backed café bar operator, will today open its 100th Lounge site, with plans to invest £10m to open a further 16 Lounges in 2018.
The company, which opened its first Lounge on North Street in the Bedminster in 2002, will today open the Sorrento Lounge in Moseley, Birmingham. It will join seven other Lounges in Birmingham suburbs, demonstrating the appeal and potential scale of the business.
The company will open a total of around 21 new neighbourhood café bars this year. Five have already opened in Melton Mowbray, Stockport, Abingdon, Solihull and Ormskirk and others are set to follow in Chorlton, Bicester, Grantham and Warrington.
It also operates 21 sites under its Cosy Club bar-restaurant brand, with plans to open four to five of these a year.
The company’s broad all-day café-bar offer centred around the community allows the business to pursue a different site selection strategy to other casual dining operators, who tend to cluster around the retail and leisure schemes.
Nick Collins, chief executive of Loungers, said: “In many respects we don’t approach the Lounges as a 100 site business. Each Lounge is individually named and designed, and managed by teams who feel a sense of ownership and responsibility towards their Lounge. The business has evolved on the strength of the people who work with us and how we have been received in the communities in which we have opened.
“Our out-performance is testament to the great contribution from our teams, but we certainly don’t take it for granted. From a single site in the suburbs of Bristol to our 100th Lounge, the core principles of the business have never changed. We will continue to open new sites ensuring that the values that have driven our success to date are not compromised.”
