what year was starbucks founded

The Howard Schultz era

what year was starbucks founded

In 1981 Howard Schultz, a sales representative for Hammarplast, a Swedish company that made kitchen equipment and housewares from which Starbucks bought drip-coffee makers, noticed how large the company’s orders were, which prompted him to pay it a visit. Schultz so impressed that he decided to pursue a career at Starbucks, and he hired as the head of marketing in 1982.

Schultz noticed that first-time customers sometimes felt uneasy in the stores because of their lack of knowledge about fine coffees, so he worked with store employees on developing customer-friendly sales skills and produced brochures that made it easy for customers to learn about the company’s products.

The Three Founders

When Gordon Bowker, Jerry Baldwin, and Zev Siegl opened Starbucks in a rented storefront near Seattle’s Pike Place Market on March 30, 1971, they had little business experience and hardly any cash. But they were confident that once Seattleites discovered what a great cup of coffee tasted like, they’d hooked. How right they were!

The most surprising thing about the creation of Starbucks is how much of it happened by chance. That the three founders ever met is something of a wonder. Siegl and Bowker were both Seattle transplants and Baldwin raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. They grew up in varied circumstances and the differences in their personalities and skill sets would make their partnership work.

1956

Zev Siegl’s family moved to Seattle from New York in 1956 when his father, the violinist Henry Siegl (1911-1997), accepted the job of concertmaster for the Seattle Symphony. In New York, Henry had played for the NBC Symphony under conductor Arturo Toscanini and served as concertmaster for George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. Zev’s mother, Eleanor Siegl (1917-1996), also an accomplished classical musician, became a prominent progressive educator in Seattle and founder of The Little School.

Gordon Bowker was born in Oakland, California, and was just three months old when his father, Gordon Albert Bowker (1918-1943) died serving in World War II. His submarine sank in the straits of St. George off Papua, New Guinea; the ship and crew never found. Gordon’s mother, Hazel Ringseth Bowker (1915-1991) moved with her infant son to Seattle to live with her parents, Norwegian immigrants who had taken part in the Alaska gold rush before settling in Ballard.

University of San Francisco

Jerry Baldwin, the son of Rowland Baldwin (1914-1989), a door-to-door milkman, and Patricia Brodeur Baldwin (b. 1923), who worked in data processing for the federal government and IBM, found his life unsettled as a teenager when his parents divorced and his mother remarried. In the ensuing family disarray, Jerry bounced through three different high schools before enrolling at the University of San Francisco.

With more than 21,500 stores in 64 countries and territories, the Starbucks coffee chain has enjoyed the image of omnipresence for so long that jokes about walking across the street from one branch straight into another have themselves become clichéd. In certain cities, it’s simply the reality: Seattle, for instance, where the now universally recognised green mermaid got her humble start.

1971

But when the very first Starbucks opened on 30 March 1971, its sign bore not a green mermaid but a brown one — and a more anatomically detailed one at that. Founders Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker (friends from the University of San Francisco, all instructed in the art of roasting by Peet’s Coffee and Tea founder Alfred Peet) drew the theme of their new coffee company from nautical mythology, commissioning that first version of the company’s signature siren and picking a name out of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick – “Starbucks” narrowly pipped the second-place contender, “Pequod”.

Growth in the Pacific Rim continued with the opening of locations in Taiwan, Thailand, New Zealand, and Malaysia in 1998 and in China and South Korea in 1999. By early 2000 the number of Starbucks in Japan had reached 100. The company aimed to have 500 stores in the Pacific Rim by 2003. The Middle East was another target of global growth, but it was the United Kingdom that was the object of the company’s other big late 1990s push.

$86 million

In 1998 Starbucks acquired Seattle Coffee Company, the leading U.K. specialty coffee firm, for about $86 million in stock. There were more than 100 branches in United Kingdom by late 1999. Starbucks hoped to use its U.K. base for an invasion of the Continent, aiming for 500 stores in Europe by 2003.