Pour Your Heart Into It (42 page)

Each district of around 10 stores has an environmental liaison, who coordinates efforts. Most stores appoint a partner to monitor recycling efforts and come up with innovative ways to cut waste. Stores often conduct Green Sweeps, sending people out into their neighborhoods, and even to nearby beaches, parks, parking lots, and other areas, to pick up trash. We encourage our customers to support our environmental efforts by offering them a discount if they bring their own cups for us to fill, selling commuter mugs, and serving drinks in porcelain cups if customers specify “for here” rather than “to go.”

Our system is not always as effective as we’d like it to be, but it ensures that our operations people are always conscious of our environmental goals.

Often good ideas originate in the stores and percolate upward. One store removed plastic knives and spoons from the condiment bar, making them available only upon customer request. That initiative dramatically reduced the number of plastic utensils that are thrown away. One region negotiated with a local dairy to take back used milk cartons. We need to rely on local store initiative because recycling practices and services vary across the country.

In October 1994, we hired Sue Mecklenburg from the University of Washington business school to serve as director of environmental affairs. By the time she joined, we had already implemented numerous initiatives to reduce waste in packing and shipping. There wasn’t, she recalls, much low-hanging fruit. So she set to work on the biggest environmental issue still facing us: double-cupping.

In 1995, we assembled a Hot Cup Team, with members from environmental affairs, purchasing, marketing, R & D, retail operations, and food and beverage. Their first step was to talk with suppliers. The primary alternative to paper cups, they discovered, is polystyrene, which insulates hot beverages far more effectively than paper.

We chose three kinds of polystyrene cups and conducted focus groups on their use with 250 customers. The favored alternative was a thin, pressed polystyrene, the kind used in convenience stores and gas stations. We produced a quantity with our logo and test-marketed them in Denver. While some customers thought these cups were an improvement over double-cupping, many disapproved. Polystyrene didn’t reflect the quality people had come to expect from us, and the public perception is that plastic is even less environmentally friendly than paper. To dispose of used cups, we shipped them to a polystyrene recycling facility in California. In fact, while it’s technically possible to recycle polystyrene, it’s impractical in many cities.

We had to face another practical difficulty, too. Typically, our customers leave our stores with their cup. A collection bin placed by the door would be useless to someone who drank her coffee away from the store. Anyone planning to finish it in the store could have requested a porcelain cup in the first place. Realistically, there is no way most of our customers could recycle polystyrene cups independently.

Switching to polystyrene would have saved Starbucks $5 million a year at that point in time—and far more as the number of stores multiplied in future years. But we decided against it. It didn’t solve the environmental issue, and it wasn’t consistent with our image.

Back at Square One, we started looking for a better paper cup, but we couldn’t find one that met our needs. So we decided to test market a paper sleeve. Instead of two cups, we would slip a ring of corrugated cardboard around the middle of each paper cup of regular coffee. The sleeve used only about half as much material as a second cup and even contained some recycled paper. By the time we printed our logo on it, we realized the sleeve wouldn’t save us any money, but we decided to offer it anyway.

For a longer-range solution, though, we decided to look outside the company. In early 1996, Sue approached the Environmental Defense Fund, which had partnered with McDonald’s to find an environmentally preferable alternative to the plastic clamshell in which they had been packaging their hamburgers. Eager to help companies develop innovative solutions to environmental problems, the Environmental Defense Fund had jointly established the Alliance for Environmental Innovation with The Pew Charitable Trusts. In August 1996, Starbucks and the Alliance agreed to work together to reduce the harmful environmental impacts of serving coffee. Our goal is to reduce the use of disposable cups both by increasing the use of reusable cups and by introducing a new, environmentally preferable single-use cup.

We contacted about forty-five parties—cup suppliers, industrial designers, and so on—who we thought might know of ways to solve our problem. We met with about twenty-five of them, reviewed their ideas and prototypes, developed a short list of eight cups that we presented to focus groups in three cities, and tested the three semifinalists in Seattle, Chicago, and Boston during the summer of 1997. Our goal was to identify a preferred alternative by the fall of 1997 and then move to production in 1998.

Holding yourself to a higher standard is expensive and time-consuming. It requires you to spend an enormous amount of time and money dealing with issues that many other companies would comfortably ignore. When the problems seem unsolvable, you have to keep after them.

It’s an ongoing struggle. But we care how people feel, what our partners are thinking, what the customer believes. So we keep at it.

CHAPTER 22
How Not to Be a Cookie-Cutter Chain

Art is an adventure into an
unknown world, which can be explored
only by those willing to take risks.

—M
ARK
R
OTHKO,
IN
T
HE
N
EW
Y
ORK
T
IMES
,
J
UNE 13, 1943

Nothing pains me more than hearing critics compare Starbucks to a chain of discount stores or fast-food operations. It’s not that I don’t admire the way Wal-Mart and McDonald’s have grown their businesses, for there’s much to learn from their success. But the image they project, in their products and design, is far removed from the tone we’ve cultivated at Starbucks, of style and elegance.

Perhaps I’ve set the bar too high. Like an overachieving parent, I want it all for Starbucks: success in all the conventional ways, plus an extraordinary level of innovation and style.

At Starbucks, we hold design to the same high standards that we demand of our coffee. It has to be best-of-class, top-quality, and express a personality that’s sophisticated yet approachable. We want each store to reflect the character of its neighborhood, yet it must be clear that all belong to the same family. Our fast growth has pushed us to standardize design and purchasing, yet we create a variety of options so we are not producing a chain of clones. We want our style to be consistent without being pedestrian. From the beginning, we’ve struggled with this internal contradiction: How do we project a distinctive and individual style when we are opening stores so rapidly?

I would never allow Starbucks to sacrifice or downgrade its elegance and style for the sake of growth. In fact, we’ve been quietly heading in the opposite direction. As we grow bigger, we can afford to invest in the kind of creative, innovative design that pushes the envelope. That’s how we’ll maintain the edge of surprise and delight that has always been a hallmark of the Starbucks experience.

C
REATING A
D
ESIGN
P
ERSONALITY

I
’
ve always loved the design aspects of Starbucks. I consider graphics and store design to be a differentiating factor, a way to show our customers that Starbucks is one step ahead. Many of our customers are sophisticated and discriminating, and they expect us to do everything with taste, not only our coffee preparation but also the esthetic design of our stores and packaging. When they come into our stores, they’re after an affordable luxury, and if the setting doesn’t feel luxurious, why come back?

Starting at Il Giornale, we tried to re-create the Italian espresso bar experience, using decor that was European and contemporary, well-lighted and friendly. I worked with an architect, Bernie Baker, to plan the layout of the store, the placement of the logo, the location of the stand-up bars by the windows, the fixtures for newspapers, and the menu board, which was designed to resemble an Italian newspaper. The espresso machine stood at center stage, with counters curving back from it.

Once we merged Il Giornale with Starbucks, we totally redesigned the Starbucks stores to make sure they reflected a similar Italian look. In the new configuration, we placed the espresso bar at the back, so that the first thing customers would notice as they entered was the whole-bean displays. We dropped the brown mercantile look and added some chairs, no more than nine in each location at first. At the time this setup was unique.

Just after the merger, I came up with an idea that has since become one of the most distinctive elements in the Starbucks look: the use of graphics to highlight the uniqueness of each type of whole-bean coffee.

Until then, when you walked into a Starbucks store and asked for a pound of, say, House Blend, the person behind the counter would rubber-stamp the name of the coffee on a plain white and brown bag. But those plain words did little justice to the rich variety of flavors and the different cultures of the origin countries. To me, each coffee has a personality, based on where it was grown or why the blend was created. It was incumbent upon us, I figured, to find a visual way to reflect those distinctions to our customers.

I turned again to Terry Heckler, for both his sense of style and his linkage to the founding of Starbucks, and asked him to create images that captured the spirit of each coffee. After he designed our green Starbucks logo, which we put on our bags, he also designed a series of stick-on stamps for each type of coffee we sold. Each one evoked cultural elements of the origin country, local flora or fauna, or the mood that particular coffee created or elevated. To this day, if you order a half-pound of, say, Kenya coffee, the barista will put it in a standard Starbucks bag but identify it with a colorful stamp designed for that type of coffee—formerly an elephant, now an African drummer image. The Sumatra stamp for many years showed a tiger’s head; New Guinea a brightly colored toucan; Costa Rica Tres Rios a woman balancing a fruit basket on her head. I wanted the graphics to become strong visual signals that would remain evocative even after the product was brought home.

Introducing the new stamps was expensive, adding 2 cents to the cost of each bag of coffee. Not only did we have to manufacture the stamps, but affixing them to bags took a little extra labor in our stores. My justification, of course, was: “Everything matters.”

We used those original stamps for nearly ten years, updating them and adding ones only as needed. Then, in 1997, we refreshed our look with a newly designed set of stamps, with different images.

Many other companies have since copied our idea of stamps. But the stamps have become visible symbols of the style of Starbucks, vivid mementos of the Starbucks experience that resonate with people and keep them coming back.

Other coffee purveyors also started to copy our store design, once they saw the importance of its role in attracting customers. In fact, Starbucks has had to challenge several competitors to stop them from using images too similar to ours. One company went so far as to imitate not only our store design, colors, and logo but also our in-store brochures.

Over the years, our packaging evolved, as we tried to maintain a consistent style but still convey variety and depth. Beginning in 1987, our coffee bags, cups, napkins, and other materials all were white with the green logo. But by September 1992, we wanted to broaden and freshen the look, so we hired a design firm, Hornell Anderson, to redesign our packaging. Working with Myra Gose in our marketing department, they created a new graphic vocabulary, with natural earth tones. They also gave us the coffee steam pattern that we used on bags, walls, posters, and wrapping paper, a brand icon that became a visual cue for Starbucks. And they designed a distinctive coffee bag using a terra-cotta red and charcoal background with the same steam pattern. In 1992 we also asked Terry Heckler to revise our siren logo: She stayed mostly the same but lost her navel. Inside the company, Myra became the keeper of the look, the design conscience of Starbucks, making sure that any new packaging or product was consistent with the image we want to convey.

E
ARLY
S
TORE
D
ESIGN:

B
ALANCING
C
ONSISTENCY
W
ITH
S
TYLE