Chicago, IL | Specialty Cheese Shop & Restaurant | Cheese, Conservas & Chocolate Clubs

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Key results

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• Three clubs: grew from one cheese club into Cheese, Conservas, and Chocolate, plus a Deluxe all-in bundle
• A monthly ritual: pickup day now doubles as a standing reservation and shopping trip
• Time back: marketing, billing, and logistics run through Table22, freeing the team for sourcing and storytelling

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Good people, good cheese

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Randall Felts has worked with cheese for almost two decades. He started on the cook and pastry side of a James Beard Award-winning kitchen, then moved into retail at Whole Foods before running operations at Pastoral Artisan Cheese, Bread & Wine. When he opened Beautiful Rind in Logan Square in April 2020, he built the shop around one conviction: cheese is a food for everybody, not just people who already know what Époisses is.

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That philosophy shapes how the shop talks about what it sells. Randall and his team, led by general manager Kelly, tell the story behind every cheese, tin, and chocolate bar they stock. Randall even considered this inclusive feeling design of the shop itself, which he wanted to feel bright and welcoming rather than the hushed, intimidating version of a specialty cheese counter.

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Room to grow beyond the counter

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Beautiful Rind opened during the first weeks of the pandemic, curbside pickup only, at a moment when people were hungry for small rituals of comfort they could bring home. A cheese club was a natural answer, and customers asked for one almost immediately. Randall built it himself in those early days, picking a theme each month, curating three cheeses, and writing up the story so people who wanted to learn had somewhere to start.

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The club took off right away, and running the administrative side of it started eating into Randall's week fast. While he loved teaching classes and talking customers through a wheel's backstory, managing billing systems and subscription logistics were never how he wanted to spend his time. As the shop's selection grew to include tinned fish and chocolate, the opportunity to build real clubs around each category grew too. But so did the lift of running them well.

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Three clubs on one platform

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Beautiful Rind moved its cheese club onto Table22 and used the partnership to expand the idea rather than just outsource it. The shop now runs three distinct clubs. The Cheese Club delivers three curated cheeses each month with a house-made accompaniment, built by Randall's team of ACS Certified Cheese Professionals around a monthly theme. The Conservas Club brings three or four tins of fish, shellfish, or mollusks, including selections made exclusively for members, and the Chocolate Club rounds out the lineup with small-batch bars chosen for craft and character. Members can add crackers, charcuterie, or wine curated by the shop's beverage director, and every box ships with an information sheet written in the same voice customers hear across the counter.

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Running three clubs at once could easily have meant three sets of logistics to juggle, but Table22 keeps billing, fulfillment, and customer communication unified on a single platform. That leaves Randall and his team free to spend their time where it matters most: selecting cheeses, sourcing tins, and building out each month's theme.

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"We're really good cheesemongers, and I love working with cheese and teaching classes. I do not love all of the administrative tasks that come with that sometimes, so it's been great to leave that part to the experts."

— Randall Felts, Owner & Cheesemonger, Beautiful Rind

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Kelly now leads most of the sourcing and producer relationships, talking to farms and importers, and the two collaborate on the story each club will tell. Randall still writes the monthly notes himself, but the marketing engine behind it is no longer his to run. "I like telling the stories of what I do," he says, "but I am awful at creating content. Having someone that's really dialed in on how to do that has helped a lot."

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A pickup day members plan for

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The clearest sign the clubs are working shows up on pickup day itself, which falls on the second Wednesday of every month. Members increasingly treat it as an event, booking a reservation, eating at the shop, grabbing their club, and shopping for favorites from past months while they're there.

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"I think how much it's become part of people's monthly tradition has been surprising. We have multiple club members who make a day of club pickup. They'll make a reservation and come in and eat with us, pick up their club, and also do some shopping for some of the favorites from previous clubs."

— Randall Felts, Owner & Cheesemonger, Beautiful Rind

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Randall recently heard from a member who'd been working through the shop's marmalades from a couple of recent boxes and had started using them to make old fashioneds at home, well beyond the cheese board they were curated for. It tells him the club is doing more than moving product; members are folding it into their own routines and finding uses he never scripted.

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Club members also get 10% off the shop's growing slate of creatively-themed classes, giving the club a role in the shop's education program too.

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Parting advice

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Randall's advice to other operators considering a club is to figure out what actually makes your business different, then build the club around that. For a cheese shop, that meant putting producers' stories front and center. For a restaurant, he suggests, it might be a signature recipe. His own curation mindset comes back to a simple test: if a customer called needing three cheeses for a dinner party in fifteen minutes, would the club already have the answer?

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Find the answer at https://app.table22.com/product/beautiful-rind-cheese-club.

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Our platform, your curation. Welcome to the club.

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