Pour Your Heart Into It (4 page)

The company initially placed me in a different division, one selling building supplies. They moved me to North Carolina and had me sell components for kitchens and furniture. I hated the product. Who could relate to plastic extruded parts? After ten months of misery, I couldn’t take it anymore. I was ready to give up and go to acting school, anything to get back to New York and be with Sheri.

When I threatened to quit, Perstorp not only transferred me back to New York but also promoted me to vice president and general manager of Hammarplast. I was in charge of the U.S. operations, managing about twenty independent sales reps. They gave me not only a salary of $75,000 but also a company car, an expense account, and unlimited travel, which included trips to Sweden four times a year. Finally I was selling products I liked: a line of stylish Swedish-designed kitchen equipment and housewares. As a salesman myself, I knew how to motivate my team of salespeople. I quickly placed the products in high-end retail stores and built up sales volume.

I did that for three years and loved it. By age twenty-eight, I had it made. Sheri and I moved to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where we bought our apartment. Sheri was on the rise in her career, working for an Italian furniture maker as a designer and marketer. She painted our walls light salmon and began to use her professional skills to create a home in our loft-style space. We had a great life, going to the theater, dining at restaurants, inviting friends to dinner parties. We even rented a summer house in the Hamptons.

My parents couldn’t believe I had come so far so fast. In only six years out of college I had achieved a successful career, a high salary, an apartment I owned. The life I was leading was beyond my parents’ best dreams for me. Most people would be satisfied with it.

So no one—especially my parents—could understand why I was getting antsy. But I sensed that something was missing. I wanted to be in charge of my own destiny. It may be a weakness in me: I’m always wondering what I’ll do next. Enough is never enough.

It wasn’t until I discovered Starbucks that I realized what it means when your work truly captures your heart and your imagination.

CHAPTER 2
A Strong Legacy Makes You Sustainable for the Future

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received.

—A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN

Just as I didn’t create Starbucks, Starbucks didn’t introduce espresso and dark-roasted coffee to America. Instead, we became the respectful inheritors of a great tradition. Coffee and coffeehouses have been a meaningful part of community life for centuries, in Europe as well as in America. They have been associated with political upheaval, writers’ movements, and intellectual debate in Venice, Vienna, Paris, and Berlin.

Starbucks resonates with people because it embraces this legacy. It draws strength from its own history and its ties to the more distant past. That’s what makes it more than a hot growth company or a 1990s fad.

That’s what makes it sustainable.

I
F
I
T
C
APTURES
Y
OUR
I
MAGINATION,

I
T
W
ILL
C
APTIVATE
O
THERS

In 1981, while working for Hammarplast, I noticed a strange phenomenon: A little retailer in Seattle was placing unusually large orders for a certain type of drip coffeemaker. It was a simple device, a plastic cone set on a thermos.

I investigated. Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice had only four small stores then, yet it was buying this product in quantities larger than Macy’s. Why should Seattle be so taken with this coffeemaker when the rest of the country was making its daily coffee in electric percolators or drip coffee machines?

So one day I said to Sheri, “I’m going to go see this company. I want to know what’s going on out there.”

In those days I traveled a lot, all over the country, but I had never been to Seattle. Who went to Seattle back then?

I arrived on a clear, pristine spring day, the air so clean it almost hurt my lungs. The cherry and crabapple trees were just beginning to blossom. From the downtown streets I could see snow-capped mountain ranges to the east and west and south of the city, etched cleanly against the blue sky.

Starbucks’ retail merchandising manager, Linda Grossman, met me at my hotel and walked me to Starbucks’ flagship store in the historic Pike Place Market district. Once there, we walked past the fresh salmon stalls where hawkers were shouting orders and tossing fish across customers’ heads, past rows of freshly polished apples and neatly arranged cabbages, past a bakery with wonderful fresh bread smells wafting out. It was a showplace for the artistry of local growers and small independent vendors. I loved the Market at once, and still do. It’s so handcrafted, so authentic, so Old World.

The original Starbucks store was a modest place, but full of character, a narrow storefront with a solo violinist playing Mozart at its entrance, his violin case open for donations. The minute the door opened, a heady aroma of coffee reached out and drew me in. I stepped inside and saw what looked like a temple for the worship of coffee. Behind a worn wooden counter stood bins containing coffees from all over the world: Sumatra, Kenya, Ethiopia, Costa Rica. Remember—this was a time when most people thought coffee came from a can, not a bean. Here was a shop that sold
only
whole-bean coffee. Along another wall was an entire shelf full of coffee-related merchandise, including a display of Hammarplast coffeemakers, in red, yellow, and black.

After introducing me to the guy behind the counter, Linda began to talk about why customers liked the thermos-and-cone sets. “Part of the enjoyment is the ritual,” she explained. Starbucks recommended manual coffee brewing because with an electric coffeemaker, the coffee sits around and gets burned.

As we spoke, the counterman scooped out some Sumatra coffee beans, ground them, put the grounds in a filter in the cone, and poured hot water over them. Although the task took only a few minutes, he approached the work almost reverently, like an artisan.

When he handed me a porcelain mug filled with the freshly brewed coffee, the steam and the aroma seemed to envelop my entire face. There was no question of adding milk or sugar. I took a small, tentative sip.

Whoa.
I threw my head back, and my eyes shot wide open. Even from a single sip, I could tell it was stronger than any coffee I had ever tasted.

Seeing my reaction, the Starbucks people laughed. “Is it too much for you?”

I grinned and shook my head. Then I took another sip. This time I could taste more of the full flavors as they slipped over my tongue.

By the third sip, I was hooked.

I felt as though I had discovered a whole new continent. By comparison, I realized, the coffee I had been drinking was swill. I was hungry to learn. I started asking questions about the company, about coffees from different regions of the world, about different ways of roasting coffee. Before we left the store, they ground more Sumatra beans and handed me a bag as a gift.

Linda then drove me to Starbucks’ roasting plant to introduce me to the owners of the company, Gerald Baldwin and Gordon Bowker. They worked out of a narrow old industrial building with a metal loading door in front, next to a meat-packing plant on Airport Way.

The minute I walked in, I smelled the wonderful aroma of roasting coffee, which seemed to fill the place up to the high ceiling. At the center of the room stood a piece of equipment of thick silvery metal with a large flat tray in front. This, Linda told me, was the roasting machine, and I was surprised that so small a machine could supply four stores. A roaster wearing a red bandana waved cheerily at us. He pulled a metal scoop, called a “trier,” out of the machine, examined the beans in it, sniffed them, and inserted it back in. He explained that he was checking the color and listening till the coffee beans had popped twice, to make sure they were roasted dark. Suddenly, with a whoosh and a dramatic crackling sound, he opened the machine’s door and released a batch of hot, glistening beans into the tray for cooling. A metal arm began circling to cool the beans, and a whole new aroma washed over us—this one like the blackest, best coffee you ever tasted. It was so intense it made my head spin.

We walked upstairs and went past a few desks until we reached the offices in back, each with a high window of thick glass. Though Jerry Baldwin, the president, was wearing a tie under his sweater, the atmosphere was informal. A good-looking dark-haired man, Jerry smiled and took my hand. I liked him at once, finding him self-effacing and genuine, with a keen sense of humor. Clearly, coffee was his passion. He was on a mission to educate consumers about the joys of world-class coffee, roasted and brewed the way it should be.

“Here are some new beans that just came in from Java,” he said. “We just roasted up a batch. Let’s try it.” He brewed the coffee himself, using a glass pot he called a French press. As he gently pressed the plunger down over the grounds and carefully poured the first cup, I noticed someone standing at the door, a slender, bearded man with a shock of dark hair falling over his forehead and intense brown eyes. Jerry introduced him as Gordon Bowker, his partner at Starbucks, and asked him to join us.

I was curious about how these two men had come to devote their lives to the cause of coffee. Starbucks had been founded ten years earlier, and they now appeared to be in their late thirties. They had an easy camaraderie that dated back to their days as college roommates at the University of San Francisco in the early 1960s. But they seemed very different. Jerry was reserved and formal, while Gordon was offbeat and artsy, unlike anyone I’d ever met before. As they talked, I could tell they were both highly intelligent, well-traveled, and absolutely passionate about quality coffee.

Jerry was running Starbucks, while Gordon was dividing his time between Starbucks, his advertising and design firm, a weekly newspaper he had founded, and a microbrewery he was planning to start, called The Redhook Ale Brewery. I had to ask what a microbrewery was. It was clear that Gordon was far ahead of the rest of us, full of eccentric insights and brilliant ideas.

I was enamored. Here was a whole new culture before me, with knowledge to acquire and places to explore.

That afternoon I called Sheri from my hotel. “I’m in God’s country!” I said. “I know where I want to live: Seattle, Washington. This summer I want you to come out here and see this place.”

It was my Mecca. I had arrived.

H
OW
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P
ASSION
FOR
C
OFFEE
B
ECAME
A
B
USINESS

Jerry invited me to dinner that night at a little Italian bistro on a sloping, stone-paved alley near Pike Place Market. As we ate, he told me the story of Starbucks’ earliest days, and the legacy it drew upon.

The founders of Starbucks were far from typical businessmen. A literature major, Jerry had been an English teacher, Gordon was a writer, and their third partner, Zev Siegl, taught history. Zev, who sold out of the company in 1980, was the son of the concertmaster for the Seattle Symphony. They shared interests in producing films, writing, broadcasting, classical music, gourmet cooking, good wine, and great coffee.

None of them aspired to build a business empire. They founded Starbucks for one reason: They loved coffee and tea and wanted Seattle to have access to the best.

Gordon was from Seattle, and Jerry had moved there after graduation, looking for adventure. Jerry was originally from the Bay Area, and it was there, at Peet’s Coffee and Tea in Berkeley in 1966, that he discovered the romance of coffee. It became a lifelong love affair.

The spiritual grandfather of Starbucks is Alfred Peet, a Dutchman who introduced America to dark-roasted coffees. Now in his seventies, Alfred Peet is gray-haired, stubborn, independent, and candid. He has no patience for hype or pretense, but will spend hours with anyone who has a genuine interest in learning about the world’s great coffees and teas.

The son of an Amsterdam coffee trader, Alfred Peet grew up steeped in the exoticism of coffees from Indonesia and East Africa and the Caribbean. He remembers how his father used to come home with bags of coffee stuffed in the pockets of his overcoat. His mother would make three pots at a time, using different blends, and pronounce her opinion. As a teenager, Alfred worked as a trainee at one of the city’s big coffee importers. Later, as a tea trader, he traveled the far seas to estates in Java and Sumatra, refining his palate until he could detect subtle differences in coffees from different countries and regions.