Photos and reporting by Stacie Joy
At Boris & Horton on the NW corner of Avenue A and 12th Street, management has posted notices that NYC's first dog cafe will be closing at the end of the month... they're also asking for any job leads for their staff...
Nine months after a successful crowdfunding campaign and newly enacted subscription plan, Boris & Horton announced that it would have to close unless it found a buyer for the business.
In an Instagram post on Friday, daughter-father co-owners Logan Mikhly and Coppy Holzman stated that the financial challenges returned even with hiring additional staffing and enhancing events.
"Despite these efforts, we've experienced a significant drop in our monthly subscriptions, with almost 90% churn, and our sales are slightly down compared to last year when we initially made the difficult decision to close.
We reached out for more details.
"We've decided not to do press and just work on connecting with potential buyers or closing down," Mikhly told us. She promised to keep us posted if there were any updates.
The space was pretty mellow late yesterday afternoon...
Boris & Horton still had to shutter its year-plus-old Williamsburg location in May.
4 comments:
This is the epitome of a business that comes across as a "nice to have", but isn't actually necessary/economically viable.
"nooooo we can't close the dog cafe"
Well, after the crowdfunding this is going to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Pretty bad look for them.
I don't agree about the preciousness of a dog cafe (if a business can make a concept work, so be it), but tbh I avoided it even as someone with a dog because I get enough dog at home and am not interested mixing food/drink with man's best friend. This is some great real estate though, so hopefully there's another, more durable cafe concept that can spring up here a la Abracao where the emphasis is on quality product, not losing space to campers, and offering higher margin alcohol in the evening to both extend the hours and pay the rent.
OMG "please tip generously" because that 250k we got wasn't enough?!?!? Please just close and give your employees a severance package instead of asking the community too....,
Sorry, wont get fooled again! Fundraiser 2.0
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