Going wholesale

Going wholesale is very different from just being a coffee retailer. The marketing is different, the customers are different and the hours are different. At our retail shop in Berkeley, we were open 7 days a week from 7am to 6pm Mon-Sat. and from 8am to 12pm on Sundays. We needed to have an employee there on time to open and someone had to be there at all times during the work hours. Like I said both my husband and I were working full time jobs and so we had to depend on other people to be there and hope that they were doing a good job. We thought once we moved to wholesale all our problems would be solved. We didn't need anyone there all the time because there would be no walk in traffic. We basically took our little index box of our wholesale customers and we thought that would be good enough. Well it was for awhile except that you really can't grow a business if no one is there. I bought an answering machine...yes that was in the late 80s when there was no such thing as voicemail. I made a recording asking the customer to leave their name and number and their coffee order. Then I would check the machine periodically for the orders. When we got an order, my husband and I would go down to San Leandro after our day job and go roast coffee and fill orders. This went on for a couple of years until we were down to only a handful of customers. I guess we really missed the mark when it came to customer service. People don't like just leaving their orders on a machine without any human contact. The majority of our wholesale customers were cafes, restaurants and a few mom and pop stores. If the customer had been with us for awhile and liked our coffee, they didn't mind just leaving the orders on the machine. But once the purchaser left and a new person came on board, they didn't think much about our customer service. I guess I can't say I blame them as I also like good customer service, but what were we to do at that time when we were both working in the day. Luckily the rent was very reasonable at the warehouse and we had enough customers that we were able to make a small profit. Of course, if we had paid ourselves a decent salary for the time that we put in, we probably would have been losing money. However, when you're first starting a business you don't take into account all the time you put in. Despite all the pros of going strictly wholesale, I found myself missing the retail aspect. I missed seeing and talking to customers and having a store front. By the early 1990s, I was itching to jump back in to the retail side.

The move to wholesale

When we decided to close the retail shop in Berkeley and go strictly wholesale, our first step was to figure out where we wanted to move. We knew we didn't want to be in Berkeley anymore because Berkeley's attitude against businesses was not very friendly and very restrictive. Plus it didn't really make sense for us to be in Berkeley anymore. At the time we were living in El Sobrante; I worked in San Francisco and my husband worked in Fremont. We decided that San Leandro would be a good middle point for us. I contacted the city and found that they seemed pretty relaxed there about businesses. I asked what they needed for us to open and they just said we needed to apply for a business license and pay a small fee and then we were open. Now finding a space was not much more complicated. We really didn't have any experience looking for space since the first coffee shop we opened was already an on-going business. We basically just looked for something in San Leandro that was close to my in-laws house in case we were tired and needed a place to sleep. We chose a warehouse place on Davis Street right off of 880. The leasing agent was as green as we were, making all these promises which I guess he should not have because when we went to sign the lease, his manager did not seem happy at all with the deal, but he did honor it. The space was about 1,000sqft and they included tenant improvements such as tiling the floors and running all the gas and electricity to our coffee roaster. We were excited but now had to plan the move from the Berkeley site to the new site. Of course, we didn't hire professional movers. We thought we could do it all ourselves with some help from friends. The move was much harder than we thought, due to the Sivetz coffee roaster and the huge afterburner that was on the building's roof. Let's just say we were extremely lucky that no one got hurt in the move. I didn't realize until after we lowered the 6 ft tall, 500 pounds steel afterburner down by rope and ladders that it originally went up to the roof with a crane. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

How it all started

Ever since I can remember, I've always wanted to start and own my own business. I don't mean to sound cliche, but I do think the bug started when I had my first lemonade stand when I was around 7 years old in Oakland. We lived in the Lakeshore area with alot of kids in the neighborhood. It was fun picking the lemons from our lemon tree and juicing the fruit. I don't think it tasted very good, but the adults were nice and bought from me anyways. I thought what a great idea; pick fruit, squeeze, add sugar and water and voila you got cash for it. Of course I didn't think it costs anything since I just got everything from my parents' kitchen for FREE. Those summer days always stayed in the back of my mind as I grew older. I always knew I wanted to start something, but didn't know what. When I went to college at U.C. Berkeley, I fell in love with coffee. I guess it was only natural considering all the late nights studying. My dad was a partner in a coffee roasting business in Berkeley and I worked their part time while attending college. It was located only two blocks from the original "Peet's Coffee" but unfortunately was not even 1% as successful. However, it provided me a job and an opportunity to learn about coffee. I graduated with a bachelor's degree in Business and went off to work as an accountant at a big public accounting firm in San Francisco. The love of coffee never left me and as people would tease me I was still in the "bean" business...bean counting, that is. After a year into my accounting career, my dad's partners wanted to sell out of the business. I had just gotten married and my husband was working in the electronics industry in Fremont, and we thought why don't we buy out the partners. We were young then, 23 years old with no kids and lots of energy. So, we jumped into the venture, thinking we could run the business while we both had full time jobs. Let's say we didn't have much of a social life then. We hired employees and I did all the books at night and on the weekends. The honeymoon period didn't last long...no, not my marriage, but with the employees. It became evident that it was not working out being absentee owners in a retail coffee shop. We were just breaking even and knew we couldn't sell the business for much. So, we decided to close down the retail shop, move the coffee roaster to a warehouse in San Leandro and just concentrate on the wholesale side of the business. We figured we could do the roasting and filling orders at night after our day job. Thus, began our journey into the coffee business and the many other shops we started.