While we had the coffee shop, I used to travel 120 miles to pick up the coffee beans from our roaster friend. It was not necessary, but I did it because I loved the roastery so much. The roasting process was what really intrigued me about coffee. I also liked that there were no customers directly in my face, and that roastery customers appeared to be genuinely appreciative of the effort of the person roasting. On one of my trips to the roastery, I spotted a 2kg roasting machine in the corner that was not being using any more. I asked if they had thought about selling it, and they wanted to do so. We settled on a price that was ok for everyone, and came to an agreement that I would not sell roasted coffee online for a number of months.

For me it meant a bank loan. I was all spent out, but it seemed like a dream to have a great roaster that meant I could roast all the coffee for the coffee shop myself. So, our garage was fitted out with electrics, a new ceiling, worktops, floors, and it was plaster boarded by a friend. It had the lot. Once again, I did a lot of the work myself, fitting cupboards, floors and painting. I even installed the chimney - which turned out not to be such a great idea. The first few roasts went well, then, I learned that roasting demands constant attention when I set fire to my flexible hose chimney and had flames coming out the roof! Our neighbours enjoyed this time with me being a seemingly constant source of hilarious entertainment. I remember some of our neighbour’s young children asking why I set fire to my garage every night.

I worked at my main job or in the shop every day, and then at night would be in the garage roasting coffee, which I then mailed the next day during my lunch break at work! As time passed, I found myself spending more and more time roasting. It meant that Sarah was more often than not having to work a seven-day week because I was roasting on what were meant to be her days off. The coffee shop had become something far removed from our original vision. It had evolved into what was almost a sandwich bar that sold coffee beans. We did not intend it to be that and no longer wanted it. Meanwhile, the roasting was quickly becoming something that I very much did want.

We were busy with the roasting but there was not enough of it to concentrate our efforts on that alone. The lease on the shop was coming to an end and I was far from convinced that we should renew and continue with it. The coffee shop was meant to be just a means to an end, a way to introduce people to our roasted coffees. By this time the period for we had agreed not to sell roasted coffee online as part of the deal to purchase the roaster was also coming to an end. The inspiration behind us selling coffee remained Sweet Maria’s in the US. They were the reason for this whole crazy idea, the start of it all. There was still nobody doing it here in the UK in quite the same way as Sweet Maria’s served US coffee lovers and to me that was madness. The people who we were buying from just didn’t seem to be so focused on the smaller customers and I thought we could do that well.

With the coffee shop being so far off the beaten track we had always needed to offer people a reason to walk a little further to us. Price was our thing, and this in turn meant that students were attracted to our premises. We really liked the students; they appreciated the coffee, and they came in regularly. Sitting in the shop one quiet afternoon, I got talking to Pete who was one of the students. He had a real appreciation of the coffee and the effort we put in. We got on really well. I started to tell him about my idea. I wanted to set up a website to sell good coffee but my skills stopped at html, and an online shop needed a little more expertise than I could provide. These were the days before you could easily buy an off the shelf checkout solution for e-commerce from any number of vendors. Pete was studying computers and was a clever guy. He offered to try to build a cart for us. This was from the ground up using pearl and cgi. Our first site worked, but I’m not sure whether I would have been comfortable giving us credit card details.

Nevertheless, we launched and it was amazing. We sold more in our first day on the site than we did the whole week on the market. Admittedly this was from people who regularly came into the shop supporting us online, but it was still great. It really took off quite quickly from the August when we launched the site.