Sunny Side Sandwiches reboots its Windsor store for speed and style

If the success of Sunny Side Sandwiches can be attributed to anything, it would probably be its adaptability.

Not long after Mack Bowers and Charline De Conto opened Sunny Side at Homezone Windsor in late 2021, the dispensary was inundated with floodwaters, thanks to the weather event that drenched Australia’s east coast.

Though forced to refit their space mere months after opening, it proved that Mack and Charline were capable of rolling with the punches. Combined with a willingness to capitalise on social media buzz, Mack and Charline have nurtured Sunny Side into one of the most popular sandwich concepts to emerge during Brisbane’s modern sandwich renaissance.

“The influencer videos seemed to go really well for us and then that gave us the impetus to start doing more of our own content,” says Mack of Sunny Side’s recent growth. “We’ve just really seen it snowball from there.”

But with increased popularity have come new challenges. As more customers flock to Sunny Side’s Windsor HQ for a feed, the dispensary has grappled with longer wait times.

“Because of the lift in the volume of customers we were serving, we were starting to see the complexity increase and therefore the wait times were increasing,” explains Mack.

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The solution? Change things up, of course.

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The Sunny Side team has just lifted the curtain on a makeover of its Windsor store, with Clui Design collaborating with the team on a refit that bridges the gap between aesthetics and functionality.

“We had this nice fit-out initially, then three months in at the start of 2022 there was the flood event,” explains Mack. “We had to do a lot of that refit ourselves, which worked – it was a clean and simple space. But we had more ideas of different things that we wanted to do just to make it visually stand out a little bit more.”

The new-look space blends Sunny Side’s vivid yellow-centric colour scheme with stainless steel and timber. In order to improve workflow, a double-sided sandwich bar has been installed. There’s also increased cold storage capacity behind the scenes. All told, the works have served to enhance the store’s output during peak times.

“Our average wait time used to sit at ten minutes on the weekends – we’re now down to around three minutes,” says Mack.

The refit goes hand in hand with a recent reconfiguration of the brand’s offering – a scaling back, if you will, of the menu’s scope to just its best-selling items.

“Items like the ham salad sandwich – stuff that we’d sell a couple of a day – some people love them, they’re great, but when you’re not making them too often they can create bottlenecks,” admits Mack.

“It’s like that 80-20 principle – 20 percent of your products are going to bring 80 percent of your sales. So we started doubling down on what people are loving.”

Currently, Sunny Side’s menu features its incredibly popular panko-crumbed schnitty sandwich (available in classic or spicy forms), a saucy Reuben, a breakfast sandwich with soft scrambled eggs and streaky bacon, a straightforward egg sandwich, and a crumbed eggplant sandwich with herby mayo.

All sandwiches come served on Sunny Side’s signature house-baked shokupan bread, with freshly squeezed orange juice and cold-brew coffee also available.

With more room to move and freedom to experiment, Sunny Side is making rotating specials a key fixture of its offering. Every month the team unveils a new sandwich – think panko-crumbed snapper with fries, spicy chicken BLTs and lobster rolls.

Now with a new look and format in place, and its offering solidified, the Sunny Side team is eager to grow across Brisbane. While the team isn’t looking to refit its Paddington location, a new Sunny Side outlet is in the works over on Stanley Street in East Brisbane – a space similar to the Windsor OG, but with more dine-in capability. Expect it to open before the end of May.

“For future stores, this will be the model,” says Mack of Windsor’s new look. “Baking is still getting done in the store and all of the prep elements will happen in the store.”

Sunny Side Sandwiches’ Windsor outlet is now open and trading once more – head to The Directory for more information.