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Earlier than there have been traces out the door, Alexandra Lourdes and Steve Jerome have been simply making an attempt to unravel completely different issues.
Lourdes, then a Ph.D. scholar at UNLV, had began collaborating on campus occasions together with her buddy Lin Smith Jerome, who was married to Jerome and would quickly turn out to be her closest inventive companion.
On the time, Jerome was operating a high-end steakhouse and wanted to spice up foot visitors. He requested Lourdes and Smith Jerome to arrange a contented hour on the restaurant. The occasion packed the patio, and it lit a spark for a brand new enterprise.
The glad hour labored so effectively that the restaurant needed extra — weekly occasions, full-on advertising assist, an actual partnership. There was only one difficulty: Lourdes and Smith Jerome did not technically have an organization. So that they made one. That night time, Smith Jerome filed the LLC paperwork. Lourdes mocked up a emblem on the eating room desk. All of a sudden, they have been within the restaurant advertising world, prioritizing storytelling, group and in-person power over conventional advertisements. What began as a one-off collaboration rapidly turned The Refined Company — and finally, the muse for Refined Hospitality Group.
Bouncing from espresso store to espresso store with their laptops, Lourdes and Smith Jerome finally thought, Why not simply create one we truly like working in? They introduced Jerome in as a companion, and their thought turned Café Lola: half inventive hub, half espresso store and the primary idea the three of them constructed collectively.
Constructing on that momentum, they launched Saint Honoré — a boutique doughnut store tucked right into a hard-to-find parking zone, the place they embellished pastries by hand and hoped somebody would are available in.
“We have been throwing extra doughnuts away than we have been promoting,” Jerome says. “One buyer would trickle in. That was it.”
Lourdes determined to doc what life appeared like as a small enterprise proprietor. “I ended up doing a day-in-the-life , and I simply began filming all the things I used to be doing, adorning doughnuts, and that video blew as much as like 1,000,000 views,” she says. “Swiftly, I turned a storyteller.”
Lourdes has since grown her viewers to greater than 1,000,000 followers on Instagram and a pair of.5 million on TikTok.
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Constructed completely different, constructed collectively
Jerome would be the first to inform you he isn’t on social media. He prefers to let the meals and hospitality converse for themselves. However he additionally is aware of the facility of what Lourdes does with a cellphone and a story.
“She brings individuals in. I attempt to hold them coming again,” he says.
That line is not only a catchphrase. It is how Refined Restaurant Group works. Lourdes leads content material and group, drawing audiences via genuine storytelling. Jerome handles operations, high quality and visitor expertise. They do not compete for a similar position. They complement one another in each one.
That readability has allowed them to remain small, quick and deeply related to their friends. Refined would not want company approval to pivot. If a menu merchandise is not resonating or a buyer remark surfaces one thing new, they’ll alter the identical day. New concepts come from workers, followers and typically their very own children. The hole between thought and execution is usually simply 24 hours.
The group’s agility reveals within the ideas they’ve constructed: 5 Café Lola places, two Saint Honoré outlets (additionally dwelling to their pizza spinoff, Pizza Nameless), the fried rooster model 3 Little Chicks, and two full-service eating places, Sorellina and Emilio’s, every a tribute to their households. What ties all of it collectively is not a delicacies. It is a standpoint.
They care about high quality. They care about velocity. They usually care concerning the individuals on each side of the counter.
What began as a contented hour experiment and a quiet doughnut store has turn out to be a mannequin for learn how to construct one thing larger with out dropping your voice. They did not simply develop a restaurant group. They constructed belief, one story at a time.
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Earlier than there have been traces out the door, Alexandra Lourdes and Steve Jerome have been simply making an attempt to unravel completely different issues.
Lourdes, then a Ph.D. scholar at UNLV, had began collaborating on campus occasions together with her buddy Lin Smith Jerome, who was married to Jerome and would quickly turn out to be her closest inventive companion.
On the time, Jerome was operating a high-end steakhouse and wanted to spice up foot visitors. He requested Lourdes and Smith Jerome to arrange a contented hour on the restaurant. The occasion packed the patio, and it lit a spark for a brand new enterprise.
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