Transcription of Mary Allen Lindemann for the show Inspiration, #71
Dr. Lisa: Anyone who’s lived in Maine for really the last 15,20 years is going to be familiar with at least the company that my next guest co-founded along with her husband, and maybe actually people around the country might recognize the name. This is Mary Allen Lindemann who’s the co-founder with her husband, Alan Spear of Coffee By Design. Thank you so much for coming in and being with us today.
Mary Allen: Well, thank you for having me. It’s a great topic. I enjoy talking about coffee and community. Thank you for having me.
Dr. Lisa: Am I right in saying that Coffee By Design can be found around the country?
Mary Allen: It’s been such an interesting process and very organic, our growth that we’ve … We’re primarily in Maine and New England but as our accounts have grown with us and people have heard about us through some national recognition, we now can be purchased around the country and mail order obviously makes us available to people worldwide.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me about Coffee By Design. What was the impetus for founding a coffee company back before companies were more popular?
Mary Allen: It’s been an interesting journey and I tell people, “You never know quite where your life will lead you.” I talk to a lot of groups about how recessions can actually change your life in a positive way. In the 1980s, when Alan and I first were married, Portland was in a recession. Nationwide, there was a recession. Not like the recession we currently have experienced but there was a recession, and downtown Portland actually had 40% vacancy rate at that time.
We, as newly married people decided it was time to actually leave Maine. It was a toss of coin; San Francisco or Seattle. At that time, coffee was not what it is today in Seattle. We landed in Seattle, which was good luck as well because the week of our move, the San Francisco earthquake happened. Being in Seattle was a good place to be. It really gave us the chance to actually see the beginnings of specialty coffee and what was going on in Seattle at that time.
At that time, I was working in advertising and I was given the challenge by my advertising agency to find a new business approach for specialty coffee. They thought that there was something interesting going on in the industry. I would bring my research home and Alan would see it. He’s a landscape architect and environmental planner. I would bring work home. He’d be fascinated by it. We both would independently spend a lot of time in coffeehouses that were first sprouting up around the Seattle area. We’re very intrigued by the culture and obviously by the product itself. There wasn’t anything like that here in Maine.
That was really the journey of who we were as people and what do you want to do with your lives. We were doing well professionally in Seattle. After about three years, we had to make the decision; is this our new home or do we go back to Maine, and when we would come back to visit Portland? We would say, why hasn’t the downtown come back and why isn’t somebody doing something about it? Then, really started questioning ourselves, who are they? Who are these people that were supposed to make the downtown come back and realized we are they.
It was this whole process of really working on a business plan to come back east and making the move, and being told that we couldn’t do this in Portland. It was through a leap of faith. We ended up initially moving to Burlington, Vermont. We ended up in Providence, Rhode Island. During that whole time, while I was working a lot of temporary jobs, Alan actually was writing the business plan that would end up being Coffee By Design.
It was almost overnight where we finally said, you know, part of this plan and part of the dream is, again, where do we want to live and where do we want have a life where we like we have meaning and we can make a difference? Part of the process was learning what a coffeehouse could do which we’ll obviously talk more about in the community but it was almost as if overnight, a friend of ours mentioned that there was a vacancy coming up in the … It was then the pornography district of Portland and within the weekend, we have moved back to Maine and within a couple of weeks, we’ve signed our lease and Coffee By Design was born.
Dr. Lisa: It’s that kind of idea that if you put something out there as something that you want to have happened and the universe comes in, and fills that up for you?
Mary Allen: It’s funny. I think that it’s really being open to opportunities and really listening to yourself and what you as a person want. When we first left Seattle, we learned very quickly who our real friends were. We were very thankful, we have supportive families. Here, I was the vice president of an ad agency, Alan works for a great engineering firm, and here we are saying, we’re going to leave our jobs and we don’t have other jobs but we have this idea to open something to do with coffee.
Very quickly, we found who our friends were. People were aware of the status of what we were doing and it was important to them. It was just being open to what do we want and who do we as people want to make a difference. We were very fortunate at that time because we were in agreement as a couple that there was a change we wanted to make in our lives, and we wanted to make a difference but do something we were really passionate about.
If you’re open to that and if you’re willing to take risks and make change happen, it gets more challenging as you get older. That’s something that Alan and I are really pushing ourselves now more than ever as we’ve been in the business almost 19 years is not to lose that ability to take a chance. It’s calculated risk but taking a chance and trusting your gut instinct.
Dr. Lisa: Talk to me about the fact that you were a poetry major at Brown and how that led you to this. Were there people in your family might’ve had questions about that path?
Mary Allen: The poetry or the coffee?
Dr. Lisa: Either, either. It’s an interesting thing that you’ve pulled from all these different areas of the brain in your life to come up with something that made sense to you.
Mary Allen: It’s funny. I encourage people to do what you love because you’ll never know when all these paths will lead you to what you’re meant to do. I think about, again, how fortunate I was that I had parents who may not have always understood choices that were made but were very supportive of it.
I remember taking a class at Brown, actually, The City and The Arts. It was this class on the arts and how cities impact the arts and create great writing. At that time, it was very abstract and I wasn’t quite sure why I was taking the course. It wasn’t until many years later, and when I graduated in 1982, it was when I opened Coffee By Design. In the ‘90s, where the class all of sudden connected to for me and the importance of the arts in our community and in cities in how we … If we don’t fight for things we believe in, we lose them. Life without art, and music, and poetry is pretty bland.
Where Brown was really instrumental for me personally was it allowed me to actually create my own major. I did an independent major in writing. I was very intrigued by women’s study at that time. I still am. Also, African-American studies were important to me. They really allowed me to craft my own major, also where Brown has the new curriculum where you can do pass/fail in any course so it really pushed me to try courses I might not ordinarily. [Inaudible 00:14:38] I would never take a science course, I took a science course.
Again, I’m really thankful that I transitioned, I actually didn’t start at Brown. I started at Bowdoin. Funny enough, I’m from New York City and spent my first year of college here in Maine. Bowdoin was so wonderful academically but I needed something where I could really explore my own path. Brown allowed me to do that.
Alan, too, when he started at the University of Maine in Orono and then transferred to Cornell, and majored in landscape architecture. For both of us realizing that these things that we started in college and didn’t necessary think we’d have long-term careers out of actually really infused Coffee By Design with what it is. For me, Brown let me explore so many opportunities and any entrepreneur is, “Don’t tell me, no, you can’t do that.” I’ll prove you … I can and why not. It makes me really want to challenge sometimes when people say you can’t.
Dr. Lisa: Why coffee? What was the draw for you? How have you maintained that interest in coffee all of these years?
Mary Allen: Coffee has so many layers to it and that’s what makes it interesting. It’s funny to me when we have new people join us and after three months they say, “We have learned it all.” Again, we’ve been doing this for 19 years and three years of research before that. Every day, there’s a new opportunity to learn something. The exciting thing is it’s about something we enjoy every day whether it’s to start your day or finish a meal. It has history to it. It has politics. It has agriculture.
There’s so many layers to coffee. That’s what every day, when I go in and we have a tasting every day at our roaster, it really transports you to some place different that you might not have exposed to and really makes me question a lot of things about choices we make. When people just say, “I just want a cup of coffee.” That’s a really loaded question for us because there’s so many questions I have about what’s going to make the perfect cup for you.
As Alan often says to customers, “I’m not going to tell you what the perfect cup of coffee is for you. That’s your choice. Whatever is your favorite coffee is your personal choice.” We have a lot of choices for you to really explore. Right now, this morning, I enjoyed this great coffee from Guatemala. It’s from the Acatenango region and from El Zapote. I’m drinking it exclusively right now because I know we don’t have any more roast. As sad as I am that that coffee will no longer be available for a while, it gives me the opportunity to explore all these other great coffees that are coming in.
It’s just so many levels. It’s something that actually we can enjoy and savor. It’s something that we actually can learn about our world around us. If it’s something infusing with coffee, we bring in and enjoy. We can have positive or negative impact on communities by the coffees we choose, by the questions we ask. We have a really strict buying criteria. We tell people, it’s not just about a sticker on a bag. All that certification is important but there are farmers who consciously choose not to get certified because it costs a lot.
In some cases, it restricts choices they can make if their community is at risk and you have farms that easily can be certified organically who chose not to because it costs them. Last case resort is they need to use this pesticide to save their community. They want that option open to them. We tell people, that’s what’s so interesting about it.
What I’ve enjoyed about our customers is they’ve gone on this amazing journey with us and they’ve trusted us as we do our homework and research in our journey and our travels. When we bring information, they’re really open to learning from us and trusting us. When we say, “This is a sustainable coffee.” It doesn’t matter that it didn’t have certain stickers on the bag.
Dr. Lisa: What about this fair trade? Is that the same thing that you’re talking about? That the certification can be helpful but isn’t always?
Mary Allen: Fair trade has been very interesting. It’s been so well publicized recently which has really been nice to see. In the early years of our business, as Alan and I were exploring fair trade and fair trade certification, we had a lot of questions about how it was being overseen in the U.S. and felt that our questions were not being answered.
The other issue we felt was transparency. We felt like the farmers were not being included in the process for what is a fair price. Standards were being set that we all believed in but … because the farmer actually produced that product to those standards and get the price that was being offered. We would have farmers come up to us and they had to be very discreet about it. They would say, fair trade is not fair to farmers.
When we would ask about transparency, people were very vague. We would say, “Can you actually prove to us that the money we’re paying is actually going directly to the people we think it is?” Again, we’re just finding we weren’t getting real answers. There also were no incentives for quality. For us, quality is high on our buying criteria. You’d have a farmer who’d be fair trade certified but the coffee really wouldn’t be that great.
For us, one of the light bulb moments, if you will, is when we had an amazing farmer we were working with in Colombia and we had Oswaldo Acevedo is his name and he owns an estate called Mesa De Los Santos. We loved his farm. We loved his product. Amazing man, his environmental practice, everything he does was extraordinary. Yet, because it was individual estate farm, because of its size, because of certain things, he was not allowed to actually participate in the fair trade program.
We had a lot of demand from our customers to have a fair trade certified coffee at that time. We switched. It just wasn’t a great coffee. Even though our sales were very strong a bit, that was one of those moments when Alan and I said, “Who are we as a company, and what is our mission as far as educating our customers?” We actually pulled out the fair trade coffee and put back Mesa De Los Santos. Our sales dropped. We started to really focus more of our time and energy on educating our customers, and sales finally surpassed what they had been.
Again, sometimes taking that leap of faith and knowing that you really know a lot about your industry and are always learning and very open to ideas that people have and questions people have but also really having your standards that this is what we believe in. This is what we know to be true from our research and our travels, and the people we work with.
It’s been very interesting. In the past two years, a lot of what’s been said about fair trade, and again, these are great questions that people ask but some people are being kept away from the table because of the certification process. We tell our customers and understand we have a list of questions we ask. There is documentation we do require. There are things we see for ourselves. Hopefully, you would trust us enough to know that we’ve done our homework.
Dr. Lisa: As a customer, when you go into a Coffee By Design, you actually can see individual coffees. You can see pictures of you and Alan up on the wall going to visit to these farmers so that you have a sense that there is something very unique about what you’re offering that you’re actually investigating the whole thing in a very in-depth way.
Mary Allen: What we’ve learned is, I think we’ve been very shy about letting customers know what we’re doing. One of the things we have felt strongly about is now using our beliefs as a marketing tool and we’re realizing that actually doesn’t make a lot of sense. I remember a customer saying to me, when she found that some of what we were doing, because we weren’t publicizing it, and she said, “I buy the coffee because I love the coffee. I love the service, but I’m hearing all these other stuff. That for me, sort of, validates my decision to buy from you. It tells me where my money that I spend with you ends up.” That’s critical important.
That’s been our process we’ve been going through the past few years of better telling the story. We’re very excited for 2013 because we have a lot plans in place and we have a team of people we’re working with now who are actually going to help us better tell the story. It’s an amazing story. It is we feel a point of difference. Not everybody does the travel that we do. Not everybody invests in both our local community and in our coffee community as significantly as we do.
We feel again, that’s important for our customers to know because that’s part of their decision making process.
Dr. Lisa: One of the things that you initially championed before it was popular to champion this was arts in the community. I know you still do this. You still have a Rebel Blend that I actually just purchased for the significant man in my life. I was excited to do that because I knew what the story was.
What are some of the things that you have been passionate about, that you remain passionate about, some of the things that you think really deserve support?
Mary Allen: It started with the arts. Literally, Coffee By Design, the whole naming of the company really came down to talking about coffee and unique, and one of a kind in creating something wonderful other than coffee. It also was reflective of what was going on in Portland again. Because of the recession, so many of the art galleries and studios in Portland have closed because of lack of business. We had so many close friends who are artists who were really still struggling to survive even though they were amazing. It just seems so unfair that they were still struggling and couldn’t make ends meet.
When we opened Coffee By Design, the first one on Congress Street in what is now called The Arts District, it was important to us to actually highlight the work of local artists, main artists. That’s a tradition we’ve carried on. The arts are critically important to us. The Rebel Blend fund which you mentioned, we’re so proud of when I look at the list of recipient for the Rebel Blend crayons because something that started so small and literally it’s generated from the sales of our Rebel Blend Coffee.
When I look at the list of recipients over the years, I’m so proud that those are people, in a small way that we really acknowledge what they were doing and even the work they’re doing now is incredible. I look at Karen Montanaro who now gets NEA grants. I look at Pinkatchu Children’s Choir and they’re traveling nationally and probably internationally at this time.
I think about when I made the phone call to the folks at the Easton School, I called them on a Friday because we actually selected them and we were going to be purchasing the instruments they needed for an African drumming class. When I called the woman, she had tears, she said, “You have no idea of what this means to us. If we didn’t receive funding by Monday, the whole program got pulled.” They actually had the funding for the instructor but no instruments.
When I think about the arts, I hope in our small way, we’ve really raised awareness and really let people know we can’t leave the art. People sometimes think a $1,000 doesn’t make a lot of difference, a $1,000 means the world to a number of people and can really get the ball rolling.
There are a number of other areas, AIDS awareness is critically important. When we opened on Congress Street, we were right across the street from AIDS project then. We lost customers and really letting people know. Even now we don’t hear so much about AIDS. There are people out there who are HIV positive and their families who still are struggling with the loss of AIDS and worldwide, it’s something we still need to be vigilant about. We have to eradicate AIDS. In our lifetime, we have to eradicate it.
We are really passionate about mental health awareness and de-stigmatizing it and with these events in Connecticut, my fear is, fear of mental illness again. It’s really critically important that we let people know it happens to all of us. If you speak to pretty much anyone, somewhere in their family, in their circle of friends, mental illness is part of what they’re facing. It’s really important that we de-stigmatize it and learn that we are all human beings and we responsible for one another. We can make a difference in someone’s life by how we treat them.
That’s always been the core at Coffee By Design and I love with our staff, somehow that’s part of our culture they get. I had a customer who was so kind recently. He said, “I just have to share with you, there’s something you must do in your training because I was in your Congress Street coffeehouse the other day, someone had come up and they were begging for a cup of coffee. Your staff member, when the customer offered to pay, very discreetly pulled the customer aside and said, that’s really so kind of you that you want to give the money,” but we have a relationship with this person’s social worker and they’ve told us that this is enabling this person to continue a behavior that’s not appropriate for them. “If you don’t mind, would you be respectful that we’re really trying to be part of your recovery process here?”
The customer said, “I was so moved by how very articulate and sensitive, and discreet and powerful the message was, that somehow your staff just get it.” Things early on Alan and I promised customers as we grew the company, we promised what made us special in the first place would not be lost, that it would be passed on. For me to realize that our staff do get it, they understand it, and they believe it has been critically important.
As we’ve grown as a company, our focus had initially been really to support your local community, to give back to your local community and we’ve traveled in coffee, how could we not extend that and give back to the community from where we get out coffee in? We have some really significant projects that are funding that are just core again to who we are. Alan traveled pretty extensively in Colombia to a region called Jardin, and was invited to actually be a part of a new mill that a company has invested heavily in to create better quality and really implement sustainable practices.
When he was there, he was just so moved by the community and their willingness to learn in order to get out of poverty. He said, “If there’s any significant projects that we might be able to partner on, let us know.” In the meantime, we’ll sponsor a high school student. That initial contact led to them approaching us about funding the dining facility for their school. They actually had built the hospital, the school. The children who are from a very poor region travel many miles to get to school but there was no way to feed them properly.
They sent us a proposal for would we help fund their dining facility. As we reviewed the proposal, we decided why don’t we just pay for the whole thing? We made a commitment to actually fully fund this facility. It is now built. Hopefully, Alan would get to go and actually see the completed project. To know that, the word we sent to that community is, you give us great coffee, we believe in you. We want to help you. It’s a two-way street. It’s all one world. This is our gift to you. We hope that you will appreciate it and that your children will thrive, and the next generation will live better because of it.
Same thing with Coffee Kids. It’s a program that a lot of people might see in coffeehouses. We’ve been involved with Coffee Kids for years. If they grew and were better known, I wondered if our money made a difference. I was on an amazing trip in Guatemala last year just travelling to a number of farms. They were showing us, later the coffee industry, then farmers to support the farm. This woman came over showing me textiles and she heard that we were one of the few companies on the trip. In fact, I think we were the only company on the trip who are involved in Coffee Kids. She came over and she said, “Let me show you the textiles. These help fund our lifestyle here on our community and Coffee Kids helps to support it.”
I don’t speak Spanish very well. She doesn’t speak English very well, but it’s amazing how you can communicate. A few minutes later, she comes over and showing me pictures of her children. She said, “These are my children. Coffee Kids funds our educational program here, too. My children will have a better life.” At this point, I’m like, “Okay, you got me here.” I’m still fine.
A few minutes later, she comes over with a translator. She says, “Do you know Coffee Kids funds our health program here?” I’m like, “Okay, what …” I just get teary thinking about it. She said, “I was diagnosed with cervical cancer and I’m alive today because of Coffee Kids.” At that point, we used in our ad. I had tears streaming down my face. I’m holding the textile. I’m with the woman. It really made me say, “Of course we’re involved with Coffee Kids.” I’m renewing my commitment. We had not let it lapse. I’m renewing it. I’m going back and making sure everybody knows … It’s about coffee and so much more.
I remember a customer years ago holding up his cup and just saying, “Coffee By Design, a great cup of coffee and a whole lot more.” That’s what it’s about. Again, as I said earlier, there’s so many layers to it. We have the gift and it’s a lot of work us sourcing and finding outstanding coffees, and finding coffees that fit our criteria, educating ourselves and our customer, our staff.
What an amazing opportunity to connect ourselves to the world and feel like we make a difference both worldwide but also here in Maine. That money stays here in Maine.
Dr. Lisa: Where can people find great coffee and a whole lot more, at least as far as it’s coming Coffee By Design?
Mary Allen: We have four of our own retail coffeehouses which are amazing to me. Each one is so unique and special in its own ways. Three of them are in downtown Portland. One is in Congress Street, one is on India Street, and then we have a Washington Avenue roastery Origins Bar where we only brew single Origins coffee, but we sell our whole range of coffees.
Then we had the great opportunity to partner with L.L. Bean and actually have a location inside their Flagship Store inside L.L. Bean. That was really a lot of … That was a really interesting process for us because at that time, we didn’t think we would necessarily be inside a larger company and yet, as we went through the process, we realized, why wouldn’t we want people to come to visit L.L. Bean from around the world to know about great Maine products and what great opportunity to educate people about us and about our coffees.
In addition to our own shops, we have over 500 amazing wholesale customers around the country. It’s everything from coffeehouses to cafes, to restaurants. We have an amazing partnership and we will always be thankful to Fore Street Restaurant. Sam Hayward and Dana Street early on had faith in us at the time we had just started roasting our coffee on India Street. We got the call that Fore Street was looking for a new coffee vendor. Here we were. We didn’t have any packaging. We hadn’t developed pricing. We didn’t have a wholesale business. We are roasting for our stores.
The way we delivered we our coffee to our stores was on a bicycle with a little card attached. Alan just thought, what a great opportunity to be around amazing people in the food industry, amazing restaurateurs. He went down to present coffee just for an educational opportunity and was invited back, did some tweaking to some blends because we like to partners with chefs and seeing their menu and getting a sense of what would complement a meal. Lo and behold! We won the account. Didn’t realizing getting Fore Street, we actually won Street & Company.
What an amazing beginning to a wholesale company. Again, we have an amazing partnership with them and they just … We’re still in awe that they really believed in us and really understood and appreciate our product and we’ve grown with them. It has opened the door to so many other great chefs and great restaurant, and coffeehouses.
Our goal is not to be everywhere. Our goal is to be at places where our product is really appreciated and presented well. We’ve had accountants approach us and the first question is price. We’re not the most expensive thing, but we’re not the cheapest either. Really making sure if they’re not right upfront asking lots of questions about coffee and community, this might not be the right combination for us.
We learned. You don’t like to say no to business but we’ve learned … We want a long-term relationship. If it doesn’t feel good right at the beginning, we’re going to drive each other crazy. Sometimes, we just take the risk and say, no. Sometimes, it might be, we really want you to … You know what? We’re going a little too fast. We need to slow the growth down. We’ve learned with certain accountants to tell them, “We’re not really in a position right now to take you on. If you can wait, we can’t to bring you onboard. Me and the accountant, we finally were able to bring on. She said, “You know, you turned me down three times because you were too busy.” I’m really glad you hung on.
She said, “Yeah, because it actually reinforce my decision again to be with you because it wasn’t just about my money. It was about you wanting to served me and serve me well. There was infrastructure we needed to put in place. We needed to train new people. We don’t want a second shift. We don’t want a third shift. We want people to have quality of life here in Maine, and we all work really hard. But it really was about … And make sure you bring your whole team along, and make sure that they’re comfortable with the growth. And make sure that [account 00:38:28] that if we bring you on, you’re really part of a long-term relationship with us and we want to be able to serve you well.”
Dr. Lisa: We’ve been very fortunate to have you spend time with us today in the studio. We’ve been talking with Mary Allen Lindemann of Coffee By Design which was founded right here in Portland, Maine. Congratulations on all the great work that you’ve done, not only with coffee in Maine but with coffee growers around the country and with all these causes that you are supporting. It’s a pretty inspirational story.
Mary Allen: Thank you. It’s been an amazing journey and we couldn’t have done it without the support of our community. Thank you.