How coffee company Equator managed to survive and grow after a major threat to its business.
Media playback is unsupported on your deviceEight years ago, Helen Russell and her wife Brooke McDonnell received some bad news that threatened the future of their business Equator Coffees.
"I didn't see how we could lose that much business and not lay people off at our roastery and default on coffee contracts with our farmer partners." Helen, who has the chief executive title, and Brooke, who is president, could only have dreamt of such success when they launched the business 25 years ago. The idea for Equator came one day when they were taking a coffee break from their job at the time - buying and selling houses.
"We were shocked by the lack of information we would receive from our roaster partners," she says."No one would share what was in the blends, let alone what they were paying to their farmer partners." Helen and Brooke were also female pioneers."When we started in 1995, there were only five women [including us] roasting coffee in the US."Today Equator has a number of high profile business customers, including the restaurants of top US chefs Thomas Keller and Dominique Crenn, and the cafes and coffee bars at the headquarters of Twitter, Google and LinkedIn.
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