The story of Starbucks success: Billion-dollar net-worth coffee chain started from a small shop!
The story of Starbucks success: The global coffee chain Starbucks was started in the year 1971. Starbucks is known all over the world for its great coffee products. The coffee available here cannot be compared anywhere. Starbucks is an American coffee company, but do you know about the initial journey of this company?
If you are a connoisseur of the taste of coffee or you like coffee very much, then you must have tasted Starbucks coffee. You will find different types of coffee at Starbucks. Along with coffee, people also like the atmosphere of the cafe. If you go to any Starbucks cafe, you will find that there are sofas here to give comfort to the customers. Also, the baristas (coffee makers) here also treat the customers very lovingly. Today it is a billion-dollar net-worth company. It has more than 30 thousand stores in 80 countries around the world. About 4 lakh employees work here. However, the story of its beginning is very simple. But do you know how Starbucks started?
Started as a Coffee Bean Store
Don’t know how many times you must have planned to do business with your friends. How many times have you sat with friends and talked about opening a cafe? Three such friends – Gordon Bowker, Jev Shiegel, and Gerald Baldwin started a coffee shop on March 30, 1971. At the beginning of the shop, only high-quality coffee beans were sold here. These friends opened their first Coffee Bean store in Seattle.
Story of Starbucks
In 1971, the founders of Starbucks worked with artist Terry Heckler to name the brand. They wanted the company name to reflect a sense of adventure, a connection to the North-West and the sea voyages of coffee traders in earlier days. As such, Gordon Bowker first suggested the name “Pequod” from Herman Melville’s novel “Moby-Dick”. Pequod was the name of a ship in the novel. But Terry did not agree to this name. After that, there was discussion about the name of the brand for some more time and in the end, the name Starbucks was taken from the “Moby-Dick” novel.
How Starbucks became a coffee cafe from a bean store?
In 1982, he hired marketing director Howard Schultz to market the shop. Later, in 1983, Howard Schultz arrived in Italy. Here he saw the culture of the coffee house. He found that there were coffee houses everywhere in Italy. After returning to America, Howard advised Starbucks to open a store as a coffee house. Later in 1987, Howard Schultz, along with some other investors, bought Starbucks from these three friends. Schultz decided to convert the Coffee Bean store into a coffee shop. Starbucks began to grow rapidly. Howard Schultz opened its first store outside of Seattle in 1989. By 1996, the company had opened 46 shops across America. In the late 1990s, the company had 140 outlets.
Takes great care of the employees
Starbucks became the first brand in the retail industry to offer full health benefits to all its employees. Simultaneously, Starbucks began calling its employees partners. Starbucks also offers its employees a stake in the company in the form of Coffee Bean stock.