It Takes Two, Baby
Well, it took two years, two staff, & a bucket load of coffee…
It’s our birthday, and we are officially in our terrible twos!
As we celebrate our second trip around the sun, it is a nice time to reflect on how we got here. The journey consists of some major highs and some of the lowest of lows. If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger, eh?
Well, sort of.
Make yourself a coffee, and we’ll tell you a story…
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We started roasting on Ozzy at a friend’s stable block outside of the centre back in the summer of 2018, and our only customer was our own café, the Door & Rivet. Skip forward 6 months, and we officially opened the doors to our own premises on 15th April 2019.
At this time there was just Jemma and myself, both working part-time - Jemma building us a website one day a week, and me roasting & packing evenings & weekends, both balancing respective full-time jobs.
Skip forward to June of that year and we began to open for takeaway coffee & collections. It was a pretty nerve-wracking day, but marked the start of us settling into our little community. Later this year we welcomed in Vlad, an experienced coffee roaster from Prague.
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We were two weeks off celebrating our first birthday last year when the news of national lockdown was announced. A shock to the country, a shock to the world and a shock to our team. Suddenly we were shut; all staff were furloughed and we were projected to drop from a healthy growing customer base of offices and hospitality to around 10% of our turnover - if we were lucky. This is where things started to get a bit scary. The first year was full of enthusiasm and hard graft, the second was impossible to predict.
Within a month, we shifted our business strategy from wholesale to domestic, we teamed up with some local businesses and we started again, building from the ground up; we teamed up with the brand new MiCafé SuCafé to offer takeaway coffee to the local ambulance service, smaller quantities of coffee was being delivered to customers at their homes coupled with baked goods from The Forest Bakery and craft beer from Tapestry Brewery. For us the aim was clear: we needed to do everything we could to support our fellow small businesses, but also keep ourselves afloat.
The operational challenges were crazy. A whole business model based on large wholesale & a brick and mortar store for takeaway suddenly shifted to small domestic ground-coffee sales - and lots of it. The cashflow was impossible and I took on work outside the business again to help keep the debts at bay. Jem & Vlad came back 3 days a week, and Jem did the best she could to develop an effective digital marketing plan.
We introduced bicycle couriers so we could offer a wider delivery area, and reopened our café doors for takeaway only in late June 2020. As lockdown eased, we saw a huge, painful drop in our online sales. Staff were back on part-time furlough, and we were not quite sure if we could keep it going. But somehow, we did.
The amount of customer support has been - and continues to be - outstanding. It’s heart-warming, and so much more supportive than we could have ever expected. From customers that offered to pre-order a year’s worth of coffee, to those volunteering to help with deliveries. This community - and Bristol at large - is a haven of independent businesses and customers who really do ‘support local’.
Without them, we simply would not be here.
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So here we are - 24 months later, via a pandemic, and we have steadily grown from just me and Jem to a full team of five, sending hundreds of orders weekly both locally and nationally. Our café/shop remains open for collections and takeaway, and we are increasing our operation hours from May 2021.
As we look forward to 2021/22, things will hopefully get a lot calmer, albeit we’re not out of the woods yet. We have such a great regular customer base, and we’re confident that things will go from strength to strength.
As a starter for ten, we are all going to take well deserved holidays over the summer and enjoy re-connecting with our family and friends. Then we’ll be back to keeping your offices and your favourite independent cafés stocked up with artisan coffee. We have got some exciting collaboration plans on the way, and are hoping to get ourselves to a festival or two later in the summer.
To our incredibly supportive network of customers, friends and collaboration partners here in Bristol, thank you again. Roll on beers in the sunshine!
Robyn and The Blind Owl Team x
A massive thanks to:
MiCafé SuCafé, Tapestry Brewery, The Forest Bakery, Tempeh Meades, Chi Whole Foods, Lost & Grounded, Good Chemistry Brewing, Bristol Pantry, Good Sixty, Moneyhub, Wriggle, Bristol Sweetmart, Forest And The Flowers