The appointment is at 4:00 p.m. in the
Plaza de Chueca
.
The photographer asks if he can come by earlier, in the morning, taking advantage of the fact that he will be in the area and thus leave his part of the work done.
- I do not think so.
It will be closed.
- How is a chicken shop going to be closed in the morning?
- Well, it's not that kind of chicken.
Look at his Instagram account and you will understand.
We meet
Pedro Buerbaum
(Tenerife, 1995) just a few meters from Gravina street.
There is the flagship store of
La Pollería
, the chain of stores with which
this Canarian has made gold selling penis - shaped waffles
.
Account that the
annual turnover of the brand is 4.5 million euros
.
It already has stores in several dozen cities in Spain and in London.
Although
the idea was born in the heart of Madrid two years ago almost by chance
.
"I had an ice cream parlor in Malasaña. I saw that winter was approaching and I was looking for innovative ideas to counteract the drop in sales that I was going to have. One day this thing about waffles crossed my mind and I told a colleague like a joke, but it stayed in my subconscious", he says.
A few weeks later, he would find a
small rental space of 11 square meters
and set out on the adventure with just over 900 euros of remaining budget to buy furniture, materials and spend on decoration.
"I remember that I took pallets from the garbage, sanded them and painted them to make the counter. I only bought a bucket of paint, two waffle irons and what was necessary for the bain-marie," she says.
The boom of
La Pollería
came from the first weekend with queues in the surrounding streets of people looking for their
chickens
.
Later, they would move to a somewhat larger venue - the current one is 24 square meters and has no tables - but the line of customers did not disappear.
His audience is varied.
From Erasmus students to groups of 80 year old ladies.
Of course,
nobody visits the premises without a companion
.
"I see it more as a business of social networks, of digital marketing. What we sell is an experience.
You can go alone to eat a normal waffle, here you come to have a good time
. There are even people who arrive, take a photo or he shoots a video for his Instagram but then he doesn't eat the waffle," says Buerbaum.
"Chueca is the perfect place, a neighborhood open to new ideas and experiences.
I wouldn't imagine this in the Salamanca neighborhood
."
With
parents who were also businessmen
, the foray of this young man of German descent into the business world would come early.
As a teenager, he set up several online stores selling products that he imported from China.
Later, he would enroll in ADE
and travel to the United States to finish his degree.
"I was going to open a store in Los Angeles but I had to return to Spain due to family problems. In the end I ended up in Madrid almost by rebound. I remember that I was between this and Barcelona. I threw a coin in the air and Madrid came out," he says.
The fears of his parents -
he says that his father told him: "My son, I hope you do well because if there is something more fucked up than selling cocks, it is failing to sell cocks"
- ended up disappearing and now Pedro has a team of people who takes care of the day-to-day running of the company.
Meanwhile, he has in mind his next dream: to succeed as a singer.
On the way to his goal, the 20-something reverts to using his marketing savvy.
Differentiating himself from his role as a businessman, he has adopted an artistic alias in which he joins his middle name,
John
, with the end of his last name,
Baum
.
Confident,
he says that he wants to be a benchmark for urban music
and that although it hasn't sounded much at the moment, he just has to give it time.
- What if it doesn't go as well as the waffle business?
- What is the worst that can happen to me if things go wrong?
It will be one more thing to tell my grandchildren.
I do not mind.
If I cared what people say, I would never have set up La Pollería
.
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