Seattle Coffee Company

“What we found was all of the challenges and the imperfections and the dysfunction that we had in our small little company were just amplified on a bigger scale at Starbucks”

“Allie and I built it, and they were our backers.”

“Decent tasting coffee, but nobody had what we were used to, which was a customizable coffee offering that we all now know, you know, it's everywhere, but it was nowhere there.”

“It was a character named Peter who, his previous job, he'd worked in Buckingham Palace as a footman.”

“We ended up creating our mission statement to reflect this lens that we knew we needed to use, and the mission statement was written out on a yellow sticky that just said our, you know, we will create a Seattle-style coffee bar that would fool a Seattleite.”

“At the time we sold to Starbucks, we had 68 locations, but we had 50 locations in our UK pipeline for the next year, and we had a whole bunch of stores we were going to be opening internationally.”

“We knew that it was a market share game. We knew that we had to get out and secure the right real estate and build the brand, and in our real, in our market, they talk about the first mover advantage, and we had to secure that first mover advantage so that if …”

“We had signed up with partners in the Middle East, and South Africa, and Southeast Asia, and had plans to go to Northern Europe, and actually had had conversations with several brands in the U.S., Well-known brands about us acquiring them to create a, an entre…”

“Around the world at that time, About 92% of all coffee consumed was real coffee, and eight percent was instant. In the UK, it was the inverse of that. It was over 90% instant, and the balance was real.”

“Starbucks food sales at the time were eight to 10% of sales, and ours were 25%.”