The Cook’s Warehouse: 20 Years Strong and Nowhere Near Done

The Cook’s Warehouse in Atlanta celebrates 20 years in business this year. In those 20 years, founder and CEO Mary Moore has seen the retail kitchenware store grow from one location to four, from 2,500 square feet to 22,000 among all locations, from one and a half employees to nearly 90, from offering about eight cooking classes a month to now offering around 800 a year. Luckily, she started at the young age of 25 because Moore is not done yet. With an unresting eye on expansion, Moore continually strives to provide the ultimate kitchen supply shopping experience for professional and home cooks alike.

Since beginning Moore has made a series of moves, five years or less apart, to steadily grow her retail business. But it wasn’t a brilliant business plan that motivated her – rather it was, as Moore describes it, a mixture of passion and dedication.

“I had a passion for selling tools that worked and teaching people how to cook,” says Moore. “At 25, when I got started, I was going based on sheer passion and what I wanted to do. I wanted to change the world by helping people eat at home and be around the table together and cook more and use great tools that work. Little did I know that it was kind of a brilliant business model; it really was. I would love to say that I went into it going, ‘Hey, this is a brilliant business model, so I’m going to do it this way,’ but that really wasn’t what was driving me. It was truly my passion for helping people do better for themselves in the kitchen.”

When The Cook’s Warehouse opened in March 1995, it also happened to be when the Food Network was hitting its stride after launching in late 1993. Moore opened the store with the intention of offering cooking classes, and as prime time cooking shows on major network television and the explosion of rock star-like celebrity chefs popularized at-home meal creation, so steadily has The Cook’s Warehouse grown.

Those cooking classes have gone a long way towards growing The Cook’s Warehouse and establishing it as a premiere, award-winning kitchenware store on a national level. The shops see a steady flow of chefs from all over the country stopping by on cookbook and product launch tours or just because they happen to be in the area as well as local chefs from restaurants around Atlanta. Whether they are teaching a class or there for an event, the chefs and cooking classes create a much talked-about buzz around the store, with the cooking classes representing about 17 to 19 percent of the overall business.

“It’s not insignificant at all, and it’s our number-one marketing tool. We are written up for our cooking classes all the time in the papers, online, from bloggers,” says Moore. “People can get excited about a cookbook author with a book launch, or an interesting topic for a cooking class, a little more than they get excited about the latest gadget. So there are multiple benefits to the cooking school – inspiring people to cook for themselves and to be around the table and be more at home.”

Moore, who worked as a chef and kitchen manager in restaurants around Atlanta before opening The Cook’s Warehouse, teaches classes herself and recalls that the very first class held was just two weeks after the original location opened to the public. At that time, she had put out a single page flyer listing the upcoming classes on its front and back. Now, she puts out a 32-page newsletter quarterly to list and detail the upcoming events.

The classes vary by location with basic skill-building classes held regularly throughout the year and the chef-driven classes being one-time events. Knife Skills 101 is the best-selling class, while others that focus on handmade pasta, cake decorating series, or cooking fundamentals are also popular and held regularly. For the specialty classes, at which chefs might showcase their signature dishes, the event is tailored to the location and the neighborhood it serves.

And the neighborhoods of the four locations are, indeed, all different. The flagship store in midtown Atlanta started out as a 2,500 square-foot space before incorporating the space next door and doubling in size to 5,000 square feet in 2000. It moved in 2009 to the Ansley Mall, three-quarters of a mile away, where it now resides in a 6,500 square-foot space, the largest footprint of the locations with the largest kitchen as well. The move increased business by 40 percent in the first year and then another 40 percent on top of that the next year. Moore credits the success in part to the mall location, which is anchored by a Publix grocery store.

The Brookhaven location came about after Moore met Doug Bryant, owner of Sherlock’s Wine Merchant, and the two discussed collaborating to have The Cook’s Warehouse carry some of Sherlock’s wine. Due to Georgia laws and regulations around alcohol, such a crossover was not possible, so instead Moore and Bryant decided to co-lease a space in 2002 and have the two businesses together under one roof.

The combination of a gourmet store with a wine and beer store was a first for Atlanta and the partnership worked out well. Moore went on to open up a third location with Bryant in 2005 in the city of Decatur after the city planners called her up to personally request a Cook’s Warehouse in the area. Moore describes the business relationship with Bryant as dating before getting married, because while the first partnership was purely co-leasing, the second was a true business partnership.

“We opened Cook’s and Sherlock’s in Decatur, and we actually partnered on that store, so we own that store together instead of co-leasing under one roof … because we knew that we could work well together,” says Moore. “The Decatur store’s only five miles from my Ansley Mall store, but it’s a different area, it’s a different city and a different county. Our traffic’s so bad in Atlanta – it feels like a completely different place, and the neighborhoods are quite different. The neighborhood of Ansley Mall has a completely different feel from downtown Decatur.”

While the partnership has been successful, the Brookhaven store has experienced difficulty due to the location and closed its door for business this April.

“I started looking for a better location for my Brookhaven store probably six years ago,” Moore says. “It just doesn’t have that right combination of great co-tenancy, great ingress/egress, plentiful parking and opportunity for growth. That’s why I’m closing that location and continuing to look in the area for another great location. The timing, unfortunately, is such that, with the lease being up, I don’t have anything that I can immediately move into, but it’s not worth continuing to wait it out.”

In the course of searching for a new Brookhaven location, Moore found herself in East Cobb, 21 miles away. The space was in a brand new shopping centered to be anchored by a Whole Foods. From her success with the Ansley Mall location near a Publix, Moore knew the opportunity was one not to be missed and jumped at it even though it was too far to be a new Brookhaven store. The store opened in 2011 and has since become Moore’s number two store, after the flagship location. The East Cobb store is solely Cook’s Warehouse and has 4,800 square feet of space.

Although the locations vary in size – since the Decatur store is combined with Sherlock’s it occupies about 3,000 square feet of the 5,000 square foot space – the format of each store is the same. A focus on quality products that work well ultimately serves as the product selection guideline.

“There is so much in the housewares industry – it is insane how many different opportunities there are to bring products in your store. I feel like our job and our responsibility is to be the curators. So it is ultimately the most important to me that we sell great tools that work, and that skews us to the higher end,” says Moore. “My filter, or my lens, is definitely on great tools and great cookware that will stand the test of time and that people are going to have a lot of success with.”

Outdoor grilling gear, gadgets, cookware and cutlery are among the top product categories for The Cook’s Warehouse. Brands like Big Green Egg, Le Creuset, WUSTHOF, Harold Import Company and All-Clad are some of the top vendors.

“We test the majority of the products that we sell. If it’s food, we taste it. If it’s product, we test it. We run it through the cooking school. I have a really passionate staff; I won’t hire somebody unless they are truly passionate about food and cooking, and so we let our associates test things out,” says Moore. “We put things through the paces, particularly before we commit to a bigger line, like a line of cookware or a line of cutlery or a line of bakeware. We always test everything.”

Next up for The Cook’s Warehouse is securing a new location in the Brookhaven market. Moore’s goal is to continue growing the business and she has been looking outside of Atlanta and Georgia for potential growth. Of course, she keeps in mind that customers today have endless options, requiring continual creativity and superior customer service to stay on top.

“Because there’s so much available to our customers and our consumers are really smart and well-read and they’re passionate about the subject matter, then it just means we have to be one step ahead of them. We’re continually pushing ourselves to learn more and grow more and stay on top of trends,” says Moore. “It’s too easy for people to shop anywhere, so unless we provide an exceptional experience for them they’ve got a lot of options and we keep that in mind every day.”

This story was originally published in the May 2015 issue of Kitchenware News, a publication of Oser Communications Group.