Posted Nov 11, 2012, 1:58 PM
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Join Date: May 2011
Location: St. John's
Posts: 1,650
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Wing n’ It soaring
Business seems to be booming for Wing n' It. One will be opening up soon in Bay Roberts and there's two more scheduled to open in Clarenville and Corner Brook. There's even interest for franchising in Goose Bay, Charlottetown, Moncton, Halifax, and out west.
The Telegram, Nov 10, 2012.
Quote:
Given Wing n’ It’s aviation iconography, saying the business is taking off comes across as a little corny.
But with the St. John’s-based chicken wing restaurant franchise about to open its fifth location — not even two years after its flagship location on Bates Hill downtown — it’s difficult to avoid.
Kim McFarlane, one of four partners — along with husband Glen McFarlane and friends Dave Deane and Sonia Ciccone — who opened the original spot in February 2011, said the idea grew out of their time in Ontario, where Deane and Ciccone operated a Wild Wing franchise in Innisfil for several years and befriended the McFarlanes.
“We moved from Ontario four years ago. We are from Newfoundland, and we were gone for 17 years,” said McFarlane.
“We always said this would really take off in Newfoundland. Any place you ever go to up there, there’s wings. There’s a whole bunch of places up there.”
Deane and Ciccone told the McFarlanes they’d be happy to put their restaurant experience to use in Newfoundland, so when Kim McFarlane was transferred to Newfoundland at her old job — the restaurant is now her full-time career — they decided to fill a wing void in the Newfoundland restaurant market.
Twenty-one months after opening, there are four Wing n’ Its in Newfoundland: in addition to downtown St. John’s, there’s one on Kenmount Road, one in Gander and one in Grand Falls-Windsor. A Bay Roberts location is due to open within two months, and there are outlets coming in Corner Brook and Clarenville in the next six months.
The company is also fielding interest from potential franchisees in other provinces in Atlantic Canada and beyond.
“We have an inquiry right now that we’re working on for Moncton, one for Charlottetown, P.E.I. We have one for Goose Bay, we have one for Halifax. We have three inquiries out west.”
McFarlane says she expected the restaurant to do well — it’s the speed at which it has that surprised her.
“Of course in your heart and your soul, you just want it successful,” she said. “To the magnitude that it has taken off, uh-uh. We wanted it to. After a couple of months, people were starting to know that we were here. We felt the interest, we got inquiries. People ask us, ‘Is this a franchise that you bought from the mainland?’ No, this is something that we created, and we got consultation on how to do franchises, and lo and behold, here we are. It’s exciting to see, because it’s a unique restaurant.”
“Here we are” is a franchise that goes through, McFarlane estimates, 2,600 pounds of wings a day among all four locations, and is looking at $3.4 million to $3.6 million in sales this year, about $2 million more than last year. The restaurant draws on flavours the owners tried and experimented with, as well as Deane and Ciccone’s experience — especially since the McFarlanes have a construction company that builds the restaurants.
“As we move, we’ve found that each location, there’s a tweak, a little bit of a better tweak to our build,” said McFarlane. At this point, the biggest worry may be spreading too soon too quickly — but McFarlane shakes that off.....
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http://www.thetelegram.com/Business/...n-It-soaring/1
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