We have reached an age where there is a Starbucks in almost every corner. Some corners have two Starbucks shops! Have you ever wondered how Starbucks began? You’re probably wondering why Starbucks uses the mermaid for its logo.

So in honor of this really cool place I blog in every Saturday, I am featuring Starbucks this week.

Starbucks
Edited from Wikipedia

The original Starbucks was opened in Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington, in 1971 by three partners: English teacher Jerry Baldwin, history teacher Zev Siegel, and writer Gordon Bowker. In the beginning, they sold high-quality coffee beans and coffee brewing equipment.

Entrepreneur Howard Schultz joined the company in 1983, and, after a trip to Milan, Italy, advised that the company sell coffee and espresso drinks as well as beans. The owners rejected this idea, believing that getting into the beverage business would distract the company from its primary focus. To them, coffee was something to be prepared in the home. Certain that there was much money to be made selling drinks to on-the-go Americans, Schultz started the Il Giornale coffee bar chain in 1985.

In 1987, the three original owners sold the Starbucks chain to Schultz. He rebranded the Il Giornale outlets as Starbucks and quickly began to expand. Starbucks opened its first locations outside Seattle at Waterfront Station in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Chicago, Illinois, that same year. At the time of its initial public offering on the stock market in 1992, Starbucks had grown to have 165 outlets.

The first Starbucks outside of North America opened in Tokyo in 1996. In 1998, Starbucks entered the U.K. market with the acquisition of the then 60-outlet, UK-based Seattle Coffee Company, re-branding all its stores as Starbucks. By November 2005, London had more outlets than Manhattan. This signaled that Starbucks had really become an international brand.

In April 2003, Starbucks completed the purchase of Seattle’s Best Coffee and Torrefazione Italia from AFC Enterprises, bringing the total number of Starbucks-operated locations worldwide to more than 6,400. On September 14, 2006, rival Diedrich Coffee announced that it would sell most of its company-owned retail stores to Starbucks. This sale includes the company-owned locations of the Oregon-based Coffee People chain. Starbucks has converted the Diedrich Coffee and Coffee People stores to Starbucks as of summer 2007.

Starbucks’ chairman, Howard Schultz, has talked about making sure growth does not dilute the company’s culture and the common goal of the company’s leadership to act like a small company.

In January 2008, Chairman Howard Schultz resumed his roles as President and Chief Executive Officer after an eight year hiatus, and replaced Jim Donald, who took those posts in 2005 but decided to leave the company in late 2007. Schultz’s principal challenge is to restore what he calls the “distinctive Starbucks experience” in the face of rapid expansion.

On January 31, 2008, Schultz announced that Starbucks would discontinue its warm breakfast sandwich products, originally scheduled to launch nationwide in 2008, in order to refocus the brand on all things coffee.

WHY IS IT CALLED STARBUCKS?

The company is named in part after Starbuck, Captain Ahab’s first mate in the book Moby Dick, as well as a turn-of-the-century mining camp (Starbo or Storbo) on Mount Rainier. According to Howard Schultz’s book Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, the name of the company was derived from Moby Dick.

Gordon Bowker liked the name “Pequod” (the ship in the novel), but his then creative partner Terry Heckler responded, “No one’s going to drink a cup of Pee-quod!” Heckler suggested “Starbo.” Brainstorming with these two ideas resulted in the company being named for the Pequod’s first mate, Starbuck.

IS THAT A MERMAID IN THE LOGO?

From Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time

“Terry [Heckler] also poured over old marine books until he came up with a logo based on an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid, or siren, encircled by the store’s original name, Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice. That early siren, bare-breasted and Rubenesque, was supposed to be as seductive as coffee itself.”

Il Giornale: “Our logo reflected the emphasis on speed. The Il Giornale name was inscribed in a green circle that surrounded a head of Mercury, the swift messenger god.”

“To symbolize the melding of the two companies [Il Giornarle and Starbucks] and two cultures, Terry [Heckler] came up with a design that merged the two logos. We kept the Starbucks siren with her starred crown, but made her more contemporary. We dropped the tradition-bound brown, and changed the logo’s color to Il Giornarle’s more affirming green.”