Tuesday, What Stays

I had a conversation with a customer this week that I keep thinking about.

She'd been ordering from us for about four months. Subscribed, the 12-ounce bag, every two weeks. She sent a note with her latest order to say she'd been diagnosed with something and was going through treatment and that making her morning coffee had become, in her words, "the one reliable good thing" in her current life.

I don't share stories like that lightly. But with her permission, I want to say something about what it meant to hear it.

We make coffee. That's the literal truth of what we do. We source green beans. We roast them. We bag them. We ship them or deliver them. On paper, it's a relatively simple consumer product business. But the woman with the diagnosis reminded me that products are not what we sell. We sell something that enters someone's morning. Something that becomes part of the architecture of their day. And if we do it well enough, something that earns a small but real place in their life.

That's not a small thing.

I've been roasting coffee for a long time now, and the question I kept asking in the beginning was whether we could build something sustainable. Whether people would keep coming back. Whether the business would hold. Those are the right questions for a founder to ask. But they're financial questions. They're strategic questions.

This week a different question is sitting with me: what do we leave behind?

Not in the grand legacy sense. More immediate than that. What does someone feel after an interaction with Spiritus? What stays in the cup after the coffee is gone?

I think the answer has something to do with intention. Not the word on a mission statement but the actual felt sense that the person who made this thing cared about you receiving it. That they thought about your morning when they roasted your beans. That the note in your bag wasn't marketing. That the email asking how your first order went was genuine.

We can't manufacture that. But we can be it, consistently, until it's simply who we are.

I hope she's okay. I hope the treatment goes well. I hope that tomorrow morning, when the kettle clicks off and the bloom rises in the pour over, it is still the one reliable good thing.

We'll keep making it that way.

Spiritus Coffee Co. — Sip in the Moment

Fresh roasted in Lombard, IL. Free local delivery in DuPage County.

spirituscoffee.com