Company Background & Brand Description.
Starbucks began in 1971 when three teachers "Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegel, and Gordon Bowker "opened a store called Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice in a tourist area, called Pikes Place Market, in Seattle. These three partners shared an intensive attraction for fine coffees and exotic teas and believed they could build a clientele in Seattle like it had already emerged in the San Francisco Bay area. Each one of these "coffee lovers- invested $1,350 and borrowed another $5,000 from a bank to open the Pikes Place store. Baldwin, Siegel, and Bowker chose the name Starbucks in honor of Starbuck, the coffee-loving first mate in Herman Melville's Moby Dick and because they thought the name evoked the romance of the high seas and the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders. The new company's logo, designed by an artist friend, was a two-tailed mermaid encircled by the store's name. .
The store did not offer fresh-brewed coffee by the cup, but samples were sometimes available for tasting. One wall was devoted to whole-bean coffees while another had shelves of coffee products. Initially, Siegel was the only paid employee which scooped out beans for customers, extolled the virtues of fine dark-roasted coffees and functioned as the partnership's retail expert. The other two partners kept their day jobs, though they would go by the shop at lunch or after work to help out. During the start-up period, the store was an immediate success, with sales exceeding expectations, partly because of a favorable article in the Seattle Times. In the early months, each of the founders traveled to Berkeley to learn more about coffee roasting from their mentor, Alfred Peet, who urged them to keep deepening their knowledge of coffees and teas. For most of the first year, Starbucks ordered its coffee beans from Peet's, but then the "3 teachers- bought a used roaster from Holland to set up roasting operations in a nearby "broken down- building.