Bacha Coffee at Singapore’s iconic Marina Bay Sands is wedged between Armani and Zara stores. Square tins of coffee beans adorn the café’s walls from floor to ceiling in eye-popping shades of saffron—the most expensive of which is Paraiso Gold from Brazil that retails at Bacha for S$1,100 ($840) per 100 grams. As customers sip their 100% Arabica coffee—of which there are over 200 varieties—and nibble on Comté cheese croissants, they can ponder digging a little deeper into their pockets for, say, a gold-plated metal and glass Sultan coffee pot selling for S$3,899.
Getting a table at Bacha usually involves waiting in line and those impatient for their caffeine fix can try their luck just around the corner at the TWG Tea store, styled as an English tea room and with wall-to-wall displays of yellow tea tins. Here, TWG sells Imperial Gyokuro green tea from Japan when in stock for S$1,271 per 50 grams.
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“We are not just any coffee or tea shop,” says Ron Sim, whose privately held V3 Group owns and operates both chains. “We‘re building premium brands.” Sim is no stranger to creating much sought-after, high-end products. Bacha is a more recent addition to his brand portfolio, best known for its plush and pricey Osim massage chairs, whose stores once populated malls across the region and earned him his billionaire status a decade ago. While that legacy business has flagged since those heydays, the addition of caffeine to his portfolio has perked things up.
Today, Sim derives his estimated fortune of $1.6 billion from diverse business interests, including health supplements, store fixtures and real estate. He oversees this portfolio from V3 Group’s headquarters in an industrial suburb of Singapore, far removed from the city-state’s dazzling storefronts. These days, V3’s chairman is obsessed with creating brands with universal appeal, especially among the young and affluent, that can be scaled up and expanded into other countries.
Two years ago, Sim earmarked $100 million to bankroll a global push. Most of that has already been spent on rolling out Bacha stores across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe, bringing the total to 24 in nearly a dozen countries. “Bacha is a big success,” says Sim. “We’re going to grow it a lot faster.” Sim plans to have more than 100 stores by 2030 and is confident that the chain will generate enough cash flow to fund the expansion.
The Arch at Changi Airport’s Terminal 3.
A more than century-old brand of Moroccan origin, Bacha Coffee was inspired by the Dar El Bacha palace in Marrakech, built in 1910 as the residence of the erstwhile governor. Closed after World War II, the palace was reopened in 2017 as a museum, and Morocco’s King Mohammed VI invited Sim’s French-Moroccan business partner Taha Bouqdib, cofounder of TWG Tea, to open a cafe inside the museum.
Michael Jordan checks out the Dar El Bacha store in Marrakech.
While recreating the Bacha Coffee Room & Boutique in its original location in Marrakech, Bouqdib was convinced of its broader appeal. “When I first saw the palace in Morocco, I thought, ‘How can I take the palace to the world?’” says Bouqdib. “That’s what we bring to every store, we create the palace experience.” The original Marrakech cafe had hosted notable figures from Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to Charlie Chaplin. Today it continues to draw celebrities such as American basketball legend Michael Jordan, who visited the Marrakech store last........