In this post, we share our business updates from June 2025, a month that was really tough financially for the business & we grappling with how to make this business sustainable and still very focused on the spirit of it all. These updates were originally posted on our Facebook page.
June 1st
Business Update #15
Johane has been hard at work bottling sauce on Friday! Finally, we have our sauce range up and running! We just bottled 1000 jars of sauce, so we won’t be running out any time soon!
We have:
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‘Tutti frutti hot sauce’ a stone fruit and pineapple hot sauce
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‘Cheriyaki’ a savoury and tangy cherry and plum sauce
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‘Szechuan chilli spread’ chunky and fragrant chilli spread
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‘Tamarind chutney’ caramelised onions with tamarind
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‘Cauliflower pickle’ great in Sammies or alongside any curry
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‘Blueberry and nectarine jam’ fruit and sugar, nothing else.
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We’re very excited to share them all with you, we love them all, but I think the cheryiaki is my favourite. I could put it on everything, I’m so chuffed with how it turned out.
It is all gf, and they are all 5 each.
We are excited to have our bottle system up and running, because it feels like real progress for our business, and a great way to diversify our income.
Also, a reminder we are open tomorrow! We have a homely lasagna with slaw, and fruit pie! And of course, all the sauce.
We can’t wait to feed you all next week! Thanks for being with us through all of it, we feel so much gratitude for our community believing in us
June 8th
Business Update #16
Morning everyone!
I’ve been thinking a lot about what the bowling club means to me lately. I think because we have needed to focus on the business and the money side of things a lot lately. We feel strongly we need to make the business work in a financial capacity, otherwise we will not be able to carry on our service to our community.
But it does feel like endless toil sometimes, and then you start to feel cynical about the whole project, and you wonder if what you’re doing means anything at all. But this week I was able to let go of those worries a little and the first thing I felt was gratitude. I realised that even though the future is uncertain, we also would never be here without our community, our whanau, and the strangers who had no reason to support us, but did anyway, because they believed in what we’re doing.
I’ve written about how I often feel bewildered by this, because I cannot feel what other people are feeling. So I thought about what makes me feel so strongly about why the bowling club is an idea worth believing in.
And that’s just it. It’s an idea first, and then it’s a restaurant. The bowling club is all about the idea that if a bunch of people come together and eat the same thing, at the same place, they can all eat well and at a price they couldn’t even achieve if they went to a supermarket.
It’s the idea that through this collaboration, we not only can eat better, but we can come together and celebrate the things that make life worth living. Of connection, aroha and support for one another.
If we can come together, we can see each others needs and can help each other out. And through this we had the pay it forwards system, and it’s grown and become something so beautiful. We now feed an average of 500-700 people for free a week, based off our community spirit. What a beautiful thing.
Before Jackie and I started the bowling club I was a student. I studied PPE. Politics, philosophy and economics. To me the bowling club was an extension of my studies, and politics in action.
To me, the most interesting question in politics today is this: we have unprecedented wealth and abundance in our society. And yet, people are still living and poverty, and despite all this abundance, we’re not all that happy.
Why is it like this? We have the power to solve poverty, but we do not act together to solve it. We have become lonely, isolated and stressed by modern life, rather than let the abundance it has brought liberate us.
The bowling club is an idea to find another way, in a very small way to answer this question. I hope it can bring people together, and together we can solve some of our problems.
I have realised I don’t want our focus on being a sustainable business to forget this reason for the bowling club existing. Since the bowling club has started I have the feeling that things are getting worse, not better. And I want to find ways for us to keep asking that question: why is the world like this? And finding ways to do something about it together.
I hope we can use the bowling club as a platform for positive change, beyond that of just feeding people, and I look forward to exploring these questions with you.
Love,
Liam
June 15th
Business Update #17
A big thanks to Bruce Mahalski for this awesome pangolin in our queuing area! We love it. Bruce has spent many morning sessions on the pangolin, and we think it gives our dining room a lot of pizzazz.
It all came about as we had decided to trade some catering for a mural. Bruce has spent many more hours than the actual monetary value of the trade, and for that we are very grateful. It’s been great having you around, Bruce.
It is just another reminder of how much support we feel from our community. Even when you simply look around the dining room, and it is filled with the hundred and abounded of post-it notes filled with art, jokes, poems and all-around good will. We feel the love, Dunedin, and we are grateful for you all.
We can’t wait to have you in this week for another week of sharing kai and sharing time together. We hope you had a great weekend and got to soak up some of that sun!
Love,
Liam
June 22nd
Business update #18:
Hi Everyone
I’ve been reflecting on the changes we’ve made in the past year, and there’s a lot to be proud of. We’ve added a lot of great new products, improved the quality of our food & given the shop a facelift (thanks to our friends Bruce & Darren). We have also greatly expanded our delivery network (with the help of Firebrand - Marketing & Digital Transformation) & now our delivery meals account for about 20% of our income. All of this is done with a smaller, tight knit team. There’s a lot to celebrate in terms of what the Bowling Club has achieved this year.
And, as always with business, there’s still work to do. One trend we're concerned about is our declining customer numbers overall.There is still plenty of capacity. Although we are not looking for big increases in customers, it would be great to have more of you in… or for you to order kai to your neighbourhood.
We have been playing with an idea to encourage people to come over, and we’d love to know what you think.
We really appreciate our regular customers. Regular customers give us a strong revenue base, meaning a slow week is not a disaster in terms of the finances. So, we’re thinking of creating a scheme to reward our regulars and to hopefully grow that base over time.
We’d like to create a Bowling Club ‘members’ program. Basically, for a weekly subscription fee (ranging from ~$3 for an individual to ~$5 for a family) the bowling club members gain access to cheaper meals. $3 vegetarian meals if you eat in with your own containers at the restaurant, or $3.50 meals delivered. If you come in enough times a week, you will definitely make savings overall. For example, if a family of four ordered food twice a week, they would purchase 8 meals. At an average saving of $1.50 a meal, they save $7-8 a week. Even ordering food once a week, the subscription would usually pay for itself.
We are also contemplating offering a similar deal for employers. If the employer signs up to our bowling club ‘business partnership program’ (via a low subscription fee), they can allow all of their employees to access $3 meals.
At $3/meal we are still able to make a small profit from our food, but for the most part we think the increased number of meals bought will also lead to higher dessert, sides, muesli & bread sales. So overall, it’s great for business.
We’ve also been receiving a lot of feedback to provide more homely options. We are working on this, but it’s not simple given our model. Stay tuned for changes.
We would love to know what you think about these ideas. We are still very much in the dreaming-phase. Of course there are many practicalities to work out, such as how exactly to identify our members at the shop/online. But for now, we would like to know if this is a service that you would be interested in. What do you all think?
Thank you for your input & continued support.
We hope you all had a restful Matariki weekend!
Liam & team
June 24th
(in response to our last update):
Hi everyone! Liam here. I read all of your feedback from Sunday and there seemed to be a lot of wishes for simplicity. So, we’re going to give that a go! I’m working on an easier to follow menu format, and I’m trying to incorporate more simple flavours, while also keeping our signature curries, etc. I really want us to create a place that genuinely meets your needs. I’m excited to keep figuring it out, and I also ask for some leeway as we do. Sometimes we don’t always nail it, and sometimes we do. We are always learning. So I hope if you have an experience that isn’t the best, it doesn’t put you off- because this thing doesnt work without your support. We are always working hard to improve here. Well, I hope you all have a good day! It looks like it will be a nice one. Open for lunch today from 12 and dinner from 4pm! Looking forward to seeing you in!
Love,
Liam
June 29th
Business Update #19
Kia ora everyone,
It’s Jackie here, writing from The good ol’ Bowling Club. I’m back in Ōtepoti after a couple of months away. 🥣
A few nights before returning to Ōtepoti, I had a dream that I was waiting for kai in The Bowling Club queue. Many of you bowling club regulars were there. A couple of my friends started dancing in the queue, and then we ALL started dancing.🕺🏻🪩💃🏽
It was this silly, lighthearted moment of collective joy. Then, I realised the queue wasn’t moving forward, so I went back to the kitchen and everything was chaotic. We couldn’t find the food. And the beautiful energy in the queue started to disappear. People were becoming upset and leaving. No one was dancing anymore. I was running around, frantic to make kai and feed the masses, to restore that joy we had all shared. 🏃🏻♀️
It felt like a powerful dream to me because it represents my complicated connection to The Bowling Club and our mahi here. It encompasses both my connection to the spirit of The Bowling Club, and my struggles to reconcile this with my connection to the more superficial “business-y” parts of our mahi. 🙃🙂
Oftentimes, these superficial worries (like how fast we can feed people) fog my mind and disconnect me from why we’re here. They disconnect me from the beautiful dance of it all. 💥
I’m trying to stay grounded in what’s really important to me. Community, connection, nourishment, supporting one another. This is what our mahi is really about. 💙
Hey, thanks for helping us keep our mahi meaningful. Thank you for being around, for coming in for kai, for reading our posts, for cheering us on. Your care means so much to us. 💛
Thank you for making Ōtepoti feel like home to me. I’ll be seeing you all around soon. 👋
Peace, love & bowls,
Jackie & team