So the hard times are over, we out here making moves

So it turned out that was just the beginning again. Where we left off everything was looking up... things were so good that we overlooked some one really important aspects of running a business, profitability. Now came the hardest years. I'd like to blame the Tories, the investors, the weather, or my co-directors, but in truth our troubles had a lot to do with me and Thomas's obsession with table football. It's really easy to take your eye off the ball when you're playing table football 3 hours a day. Take this as a lesson, when things get a bit easier you need to work harder.

Do you remember the summer of 2023? It was an absolute banger for weather. Harley was starting to freak out a little bit about how our order growth had stagnated, and the Foosball obsession had morphed into a swimming obsession. It wasn't long before we found ourselves in hot water. We'd received fantastic support from our suppliers and clients, and suddenly found ourselves in a very vulnerable position. We'd contracted tonnes of coffees, and found ourselves sitting on huge amounts of stock we needed to pay for. A few very heated meetings made things clear, we have to sell, we have to make margin, if we don't it's over.

We went for it hard that Autumn. All of us dug so so deep. Long days, long drives, meeting after meeting. We doubled down and doubled our turnover in 4 months. It put significant pressure on our home lives, but instantly reduced the pressure's we were facing as a business. The confusing thing though, was that we still seemed to be loosing money. How could this be? Ahhh, margins. We did a lot of boring work on the margins, increased the price of our offering slightly, and decided the retail tubs had to go - our packaging costs were killing us.

We launched another brand, an approachable brand. One that sells really lovely lattes to anyone. We put our heads together to create something that's the opposite of Cuppers, but is still fully Cuppers. We worked with Liam Ricketts and Tess Sweeney to flesh out the brand, the guys were wicked and made the process really enjoyable despite the pressure we were under - in classic Cuppers fashion we had a launch date for the first site before we even had a name.

This one kind of came out of nowhere. We'd been buying some amazing coffees from Aquiares Estate in Costa Rica, and were all getting into the story as well as the bowls. We found some of Diego's coffees available on Algrano, and Harley used the platform to get a direct line to the main man himself. There was a process of back and forth, we sent some examples of the coffees we were already buying from him over, he sent us samples of what he could do for our house espresso, and in no time at all we had a container arrive from Costa Rica. Our second direct trade project was afloat!

Obviously free Palestine. We've always been political, but we suddenly found ourselves with a platform to shout from. We launched a product for Palestine and donated 50% of the turnover generated to Islamic Relief. We raised about 3k for the relief effort, a drop in the ocean. This marked a turning point for our company, we began to recognise the power we have as a collective of ethically and politically minded people, and vowed to make this a growing part of what we project into the world. We know we're making positive change in how we trade coffee, and hope we can have a much bigger impact as we grow into a stable and profitable company.

Finally - after about 2 years of indecision - our new packaging solution landed with us. Overnight we decided the tubs that launched us were an evil distraction from the quality of the coffee we sell. The company line is now that any unnecessary packaging is completely unethical. People shouldn't be buying coffee because of how pretty the packaging is, trust us, we know how much that shit costs. There's no excuse, it's wasteful, but more than that - it literally diverts value from the product and producer - if you're retail box costs over a quid then that's a few pounds a kilo you can't pay for the green coffee. Bags for life!

Selling Coffee isn't easy - we're not the worlds most approachable brand, and the most exciting aspects of our company tend to understated. So we we're looking for someone with nerves of steel to fill our first full time sales position. We actually advertised this time, a load of people applied - but they were all coffee people not sales people. Nick sold himself to us, we fell for it hook line and sinker. People seem to like him, we like him, although it does feel a bit like we're the motorbike some guys buy as they approach their 50's.

So we'd done a few utterly wasteful things - Birmingham Coffee Festival, Cafe Culture, London Coffee Festival, numerous shop events, printing lots of stickers... this list goes on suffice as to say that we felt like we needed to try something completely different for our marketing budget. Having experienced some success in selling coffee to garden centres we decided to take the plunge and attend their big industry expo. We took Nick, Helen, and Thomas's, dad and were ready to make a splash! It was soo dry... we could've bought thousands of edgy stickers for a fraction of the cost. We got some good contacts if you ever want your garden redone though.

The Locale thing was going pretty good so far, we had a few great people working for us and the lattes were selling like hotcakes. We blinked and 1 site became 3 with the opening of Locale at Dock10 and Locale Sheffield. I want to shout out Sapphire here, she made it possible by absolutely slaying the managerial roll on for the MCR sites. Sadly Sapphire is moving on, she's heading to London soon to be come the next James Hoffman probably.

Emmanuel Rusatira came to see us - we not me because I was in Colombia - but everyone else. I can't tell you how good it must have felt to have him here, cos I wasn't there, but I can say how much it means to us as a company to host our first direct trade partner in grey old Sheff. Emma's a fucking dude, working closely with him over the years is possibly the biggest reason this whole thing has worked. Respect.

Somehow, someway, I managed to convince the company to send me to Colombia. We've always thrown shade on roasters going to origin prematurely, being severely under resourced from inception, those kind of jolly's just weren't an option for us. We've done really well at building relationships over Whatsapp, so have never really seen the point. I went, we got access to a load of amazing coffees we'd never have seen otherwise, it was amazing... I think now we're a company that goes to origin. If you wanna read about the trip the trip here's a blog.

So here I can admit... until 2025 we weren't a real coffee roasters. We had a scrappy unit we used for offices and packing, a prickly arrangement that allowed us use of a coffee roaster, and only our dreams to pull it together. We could feel the morning drawing near, and decided to take control of the future we were about to wake up to. We leased a massive fucked old unit and begun work building our roastery... water came in from the roof, the floor, and the walls. It took about 4 months of work to make the complex liveable, Thomas thinks that's good going, I absolutely hated it.

So were roasting a fair bit of coffee by this point, and driving to Chesterfield 3 days a week to roast is driving everyone mad (just Harley and Callum actually). A couple of meetings were had and some funding became available, and just like that we were buying roasters. The boys flew over to Prague to try a Typhoon, then Harley flew over to Greece to play an IRM. We put the ball firmly in Harley's court to decide what the future would taste like and IRM slayed the other options, so much so that we picked up 2 of em. Honestly it kicks the crap out of the Loring, everything tastes and smells incredible off it. Maybe we don't need Harley any more, he makes it look easy on the 30 kilo beasty boi.