So instead of paying for market research, for every question we asked: “If I was a customer, would I like this?”
Which was easy because we were customers ourselves. Our guiding light was looking at everything from the customer’s point of view. We had no experience in coffee or retail, but we went for it and learnt along the way. I had seen the new-style coffee bars in New York and wanted to have skinny lattes and the muffins I had there in London. I started Coffee Republic with my brother Bobby in 1995 (before Starbucks hit our shores). And, on a much, much smaller scale, my own story. Love might sound a flaky topic for hard-nosed business leaders, but there are many similar stories of founders returning to their companies for love - those of Michael Dell and, of course, Steve Jobs, for example. In his own words: “When you love something as much as I love Starbucks, there is a huge responsibility that goes with it.” When it was leaked and its recommendations ignored, Schultz returned as CEO. How much? First, he wrote an email to the then CEO Jim Donald mentioning the “watering down of the Starbucks brand”.
So in 2008, eight years after Schultz resigned as CEO, when the company’s new management replaced hand-operated espresso machines with automated ones that took the theatre and romance out of coffee - basically everything the Starbucks Schultz had built was about - he noticed. For Howard Schultz, who grew Starbucks from a local Seattle coffee shop into a globe-spanning giant, love was in the details of the coffee-making process - the hiss of the machines and the smell of the beans. In a relationship, that might be a partner’s laugh or particular way of moving. When you love something, you notice the details.
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