Author: Peter Prato / Source: 99U by Behance
James Freeman started Blue Bottle Coffee as a side hustle and the company has grown from a single espresso cart to 40 locations around the world today. In this interview, he discusses how he used negative space to create a signature design aesthetic, how Blue Bottle carved out its own space in a crowded industry, and how his previous career as a musician influenced his approach to business.
Look back to San Francisco in August 2002 when James Freeman’s idea to start Blue Bottle Coffee began to take shape. You’ll see an uninspired professional clarinet player who decided to invest $20,000 to turn his hobby of roasting coffee into a business. It began with an espresso cart.
Sixteen years later, Blue Bottle has grown from that one humble coffee cart to 40 locations throughout the United States and Japan. (Last year, Freeman sold 68% of the company for a reported $425 million and remains the CEO).
So what does this the coffee business have to with design and craft? Freeman credits many of the skills he learned as a classical musician with helping him to form the identity of Blue Bottle. From the attention he pays to negative space in the physical cafes to the typography on the company products, Freeman created Blue Bottle cafes to be places where minimalist is clean, not cold, and utilitarian exudes a distinctive personality. As Freeman says, “Blue Bottle Coffee is recognizable not so much for what is there, but rather for what is not.”
99U recently spoke with Freeman at Hustlecon to learn about how constraints led to Freeman’s pared-down approach to branding, why the most noticeable design comes from taking things out, and how focusing on the experience of the coffee and the environment has led Blue Bottle to stand out in a crowded field.
Take us back to the beginning. When did you open your first brick and mortar store?
My first seven day-a-week shop opened January 23rd, 2005. It was a kiosk in Hayes Valley on Linden Street in San Francisco. It’s still there! We made about $300 that day, so there were a few months of not being sure if it was going to work out. We made every drink made to order, and that was very different than what you could get in San Francisco at that time.
How did you identify a need for what you were doing?
I was fascinated by what I was doing as a hobby, and there wasn’t anyone else doing it. I thought there was a decent chance I could make a living out of it, not to the degree it has been successful, but making a living out of it was good enough for me.
Did you have a master plan?
There has never been a master plan!
What were some of the early takeaways when introducing people to a new paradigm for something as normal as coffee?
People at the time couldn’t understand why I was opening a coffee place. There was the feeling that the pinnacle of coffee had arrived with Peet’s Coffee. Starbucks had been coming into town, too. I would get a lot of unhelpful feedback on how much competition there was, and how little chance I had in an environment people were calling “so saturated.” But I just wanted to do what I wanted to do! I wanted to make these very different type of tastes from Peet’s.
The general belief was that Starbucks and Peet’s were luxury products, so why was I charging more than them? There is a phrase: “The normative power of the actual.” You can think that certain coffee that you are used to is the finest and the best, but once you’ve had some different tastes, then those can seem normal. You normalize this new, more expensive, and more time consuming experience because you like what you are getting from it.
Blue Bottle has a different sense of craft and environment than Peet’s or Starbucks. Was that intentional?
Art is about constraints, right? It started out that I had a cart and a 250-foot kiosk and the freedom that those constraints gave me meant I couldn’t have a lot of extra stuff, so I had to be very pared down. But I also like to live very pared down. I don’t like things arranged on shelves, for example. Shelves are for books or dishes. They are a tool, not a decoration. But after working on 40 cafes now,…
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