In it from the Start
Meet Espresso Supply — Exclusive Sponsor of Standart Issue 6
By Rhian Sasseen, originally published in Standart Issue 6.
In Ballard, a Seattle neighbourhood once home to Scandinavian immigrants and now filled with the requisite cafes, bars, and restaurants of the nominally hip, the sound of construction always fills the air. Like the rest of the city it belongs to, the neighborhood is growing rapidly; even on a Monday morning, on a stretch of 51st Street that’s populated mostly by warehouses and single-family homes, the sounds of cement and steel echo and clang. There is a cheerfully industrious quality to the hammering — a humming, not unlike the sound of coffee beans being ground. Perhaps this is why the headquarters of Espresso Supply, a specialty coffee equipment business first opened over twenty years ago, are located here.
Though its name might imply otherwise, Espresso Supply sells neither coffee beans nor espresso machines. ‘I had to answer that question many times in the beginning,’ laughs company founder Laura J. Sommers one hot July Monday, sitting next to the company’s director of marketing, Carol Blayden, and thinking back to the early stages of the business. Early customers, she says, were ‘like, really? Because of course I will say that “Espresso Supply” is something of an inaccurate description, because we don’t sell any coffee!’
Instead, the company’s glossy catalogue — a far cry from the thin, black-and-white sketch festooned pages of its early days — is filled with measuring cups, tampers, bean trays, and other sundry items dedicated to satisfying even the most obscure barista needs. ‘It was our intention to sell small things to a broad variety.’
Sommers started Espresso Supply after working at Uptown Espresso beginning in 1990, a Seattle coffeehouse that was one of many in the late 1980s and early ’90s offering a more specialised experience to its customers. It was a scene where many of the particulars that today feel almost mundane — Sommers attributes the widespread popularity of latte art, for instance, to local café owner David Schomer — were born. In photos from her time at Uptown, a young Sommers smiles at the camera, posing in a blue coffee cup costume complete with fabric foam. ‘I made the costume,’ she says. ‘I’m certainly not a business major, I’m an art major, and coffee allows for a tremendous amount of creativity in almost all aspects and components of the industry.’
Sommers spotted a gap in the market between the purveyors of espresso machinery and the everyday supplies necessary for running a successful café. ‘Rather than going in where the equipment people have a lot invested in each individual sale, with possibly no guarantee that there’s future sales if they only open up one shop,’ she decided to go small, though not quite as small as those selling coffee beans. ‘The coffee companies have a full revenue model that involves ordering every week,’ she laughs. ‘When they see our business model, they think, oh my gosh, you’re charging twenty dollars? That doesn’t even seem worth it! But it definitely has been worth it for us.’
After working at both the store and a small cart, Sommers started her own company. Though this coincided with the explosion of specialty coffee shops and a greater pop-cultural gaze on Seattle, Sommers insists that though she was at the right place at the right time, she was always focused on Espresso Supply as a national company, not an arbiter or ambassador of the Seattle coffee scene. As it happens, the story of Espresso Supply’s growth coincides with the story of Seattle’s; today, Espresso Supply ships its goods not only around the United States but to other countries, too. Even so, Seattle was the initial spark, the stomping grounds.
The company grew. What was first located in Sommers’s own home quickly became something more, and now employs a variety of full-time employees. The company switched offices and expanded their team while Sommers’s family grew, and in the photos from that era there is an easy-going humour. In one, Sommers points out, is a former employee who to this day still cuts her children’s hair. ‘I think it’s in keeping with our temperament and how we see ourselves in the industry,’ Sommers explains, to focus on smaller items and smaller cafes. ‘We continue to play this role and it’s fun. The industry grows and the people who we’ve seen come into it are now getting married, and having families and children of their own, and they’re still competing in competitions.’
That same gentle humour extends to the ways the company has portrayed itself over the years. Leaning against Espresso Supply’s current blue office walls are advertisements from the company’s early days, with eye-catching jokes like, ‘We’ve been in the coffee business longer than goatees,’ and ‘Now you get to be the demanding customer for a change.’
‘We didn’t print that one,’ she says, gesturing towards one that reads, ‘A supplier that knows an airpot won’t get you stoned.’ ‘Though today maybe we could.’
With the advent of the Internet came another opportunity to reach out to other coffee consumers across the country and world. This idea of a community, of an inherent bond to be forged between specialty coffee consumers the world over, is in fact at the heart of the endeavour and Espresso Supply’s continued business. ‘It’s a very relationship heavy industry,’ Sommers muses, and it’s true: the history of coffee is the history of human connection, and the validity of human conversation.
Think of the kaffeeklatches of pre-war Austria, the first coffeehouses of the early Ottoman Empire, each thick with ideas. The American coffeehouse, that staple of college towns, borrows from that format and standardised it with the profusion of coffeehouses starting in the ’90s to today. ‘I still get questions all the time about former employees. It’s a reasonably personal industry,’ Sommers says, reflecting on the customers she’s become friends with over the years. ‘I don’t know if other industries are like that, or if it is just kind of a feature of specialty coffee. My feeling is that it is related to specialty coffee, just because coffee is a social product. People want to get together and have a coffee, they want people over to their house to have a coffee, they meet at a café — it’s a very social activity.
‘It’s very important, or it’s perceived to be important, to be kind of like a cool coffee company,’ she continues, ‘which isn’t really us. We don’t really attempt to do it, because we’d be really bad at it. But sometimes people are confused, because there’s so much tweeting about whatever coffee you’re serving [and] drinking, and so sometimes I’ve had to explain to people that we’re not attempting to be that company. There’s a lot of companies doing that, and not everyone needs to do that. We’re much more comfortable as a supporting supplier.’
She likens Espresso Supply’s relationship with cafés and coffeehouses as akin to a roadie and rock star. ‘We are definitely not looking to be in the limelight, we’re the one who’s switching out the guitar strings when the string breaks… I really kind of saw our role as being of that kind of place of consolidation and support that all the Starbucks were getting at corporate headquarters, just to save time and make it more efficient for the independent operators.’
So strong is Espresso Supply’s commitment to their relationships within the coffee industry, and for contributing to the foundation for new relationships to flourish, that they are one of the sponsors of Coffee Fest, a coffee and tea trade show that occurs annually in the Eastern, Central, and Western areas of the United States. The show also features a latte art championship, a thin line of history that directly connects the ’90s coffee culture in which Espresso Supply first found itself to the present day popularity of specialty coffee. They’ve also been a long-time sponsor of the U.S. Brewer’s Cup and World Barista Championship, a move that allows Espresso Supply to directly support the barista profession and baristas’ enthusiasm for advancing excellence in coffee.
In the future, Sommers sees specialty coffee as continuing in two ways. In the first, she thinks that it will continue to grow in popularity among coffee enthusiasts that want to recreate their café experience in their homes. (Her tip for the home brewer: Use more coffee. ‘There are only two ingredients, coffee and water!’) Secondly, she sees specialty coffee as continuing to grow in popularity all over the world, particularly in Asia, where artisanal coffee shops have multiplied in the last decade. ‘One of the things about the Internet,’ she points out, ‘is that everybody who’s in business is in global business.’
‘We don’t know for sure,’ Blayden adds from where she’s sitting, ‘but [Espresso Supply] is probably the largest global [coffee supply] company.’
‘There are some cultural interpretations that you get in every country that embraces it,’ Sommers continues. ‘The tradition of espresso came from Italy to the United States, where it was transformed into being this social meeting place with the introduction of the latte and the mocha, and that is what is being exported from America to around the world.
‘I view what you call the specialty café as being the most recent edition to the food service establishment. It is embedded in our culture completely now, as much as fast food is. There’s no going back.’
And who would want to? Over the years, Espresso Supply has expanded from a basement to the three buildings that make up the business’ headquarters today. Specialty coffee, too, has grown; from this small, remote corner of the country, certain elements of the Seattle coffee scene have spread, and the American specialty café has flourished. On the pavement outside of Espresso Supply’s office, pedestrians stroll by with dogs, and the sounds of hammers clang from a half-finished apartment building down the road. For twenty-one years, Espresso Supply has provided both the physical components of coffee culture to its customers, as well as the more ephemeral ones of community, friendship, and conversation. ‘The genie,’ to quote Sommers, ‘is out of the bottle,’ and into the carafe.
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