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.

—MARK ROTHKO, IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ,

JUNE 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.

CREATING A DESIGN PERSONALITY

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 terracotta 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.

EARLY STORE DESIGN:

BALANCING CONSISTENCY WITH STYLE

Beginning in 1987, we developed a strong overall design theme that would ensure that our stores looked alike. My objective was to make each store in each new market reflect a mirror image of the early Starbucks stores in Seattle. When we moved to Chicago and Los Angeles and other cities, I wanted the new stores to project the values and style of the original Starbucks.

As the rollout accelerated, we gradually realized the importance of designing our stores ourselves, for speed and efficiency as well as design integrity. We tried using outside designers and architects, but some of them didn’t get it. They gave us what was “in” in retail that year, and we wanted a look that was unique and sustainable.

So we made a decision that was costly but also farsighted: Starting in 1991, we built up our own team of architects and designers, to ensure that each of our stores would convey the right image. Most entrepreneurial companies can’t afford to employ such skilled people at this stage of growth. At first, they worked under Christine Day, who was then vice president for store planning. We had, in effect, an in-house architecture and design firm.

The first 100 or so stores were designed by hand, on drafting tables, and I examined and approved the detailed plan for each, from signage to counter finishes. Once, when layout issues cropped up at our first three stores in Los Angeles, I flew there with our designers the next day to figure out how to make it right.

Ironically, though all our stores looked similar, they were never uniform in a cookie-cutter way. At first, in fact, we custom-designed every store because we had to. Unlike McDonald’s, we don’t own our real estate and build freestanding stores, but rather sign leases and move into existing spaces that differ in size and shape. To control costs, we had to use similar materials and furnishings, but no two stores were exactly alike. For example, depending on the setting—urban or suburban, formal or informal—we varied the type of wood finishes used (dark cherry, light cherry, or maple) within the larger design parameters.

To keep the look consistent and the expenses reasonable, two of our designers, Brooke McCurdy and Kathleen Morris, developed a series of palettes, each with six basic colors and multiple options, including choices of various light fixtures, countertops, and colors of hardwood veneers. Christine Day used the analogy of sisters—each with an individual appearance, but clearly from the same family. Our designers had a sense of ownership for each project, and often took calls from the field when construction managers uncovered a brick wall or other aspect that might affect design.

Still, as Starbucks expanded across the country, people began to complain that too many of our stores looked alike—a vulnerability that competitors were eager to exploit. In every city in America, small, independent coffeehouses opened up with original decor tailored to the local mood and sensibility. In college towns, they were funky and offbeat. In suburbs they were down-home and cozy. However the coffee tasted, if they created an atmosphere that felt comfortable and pleasant, they would attract customers. People began to say our design was hard-edged and institutional.

It’s a criticism that cuts to the heart. We want to establish a personal connection with our customers, but we also want our stores to be accessible and convenient. How do you open 300 stores a year, each one of them distinctive and designed to fit the tone of the local neighborhood?

In 1994, under Arthur Rubinfeld, we began to experiment with different formats. We designed a handful of unique stores customized to fit specific needs. We experimented with a few drive-throughs in locations where commuters were in a rush to get somewhere. We designed kiosks in a few supermarkets and other public places.

But most important for those who wanted a Third Place, we added seating and introduced the concept of Grand Cafés, large flagship stores with fireplaces, leather chairs, newspapers, couches, attitude. Customers love them. There’s something wonderfully satisfying about curling up with a cup of coffee in front of a fireplace.

At one location in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, we created a bohemian living room on the second floor. Complete with tattered couches and easy chairs bought at garage sales, it quickly became an afternoon oasis and an evening gathering place in a city not known for safe places to kick back and relax.

But this approach led to a bigger problem. Our rapid growth into numerous new markets, coupled with our larger formats, was causing initial store investments to spiral out of control. Our average store-opening cost hit a peak of $350,000 in 1995, an impossibly high figure. The Grand Cafés we had custom-designed cost much more.

So we faced a new dilemma: how to cut costs drastically yet still compose a next-generation design scheme that would look fresh no matter how many stores we built.

TO STAY ONE STEP AHEAD,

YOU HAVE TO INVEST IN CREATIVITY

That’s the conundrum we handed Wright Massey when Arthur hired him in 1994 to be vice president of design. Wright doesn’t fit the typical image of a designer. With his thick face and strong jaw, he looks as if he’d feel more at home on a football field than in a studio. Yet not only is he an experienced architect—he has designed some forty hotels—but he’s also a watercolor artist. He’s outspoken and direct, with a strong Carolina drawl, quick to criticize and quick to recognize a brilliant idea.

Wright forced our people to work together as a team in ways they never had before. He had them hammer out a plan for “synergistic rollout,” laying out expectations for our people in each of the disciplines of real estate, construction, design, operations, purchasing, and contract management. Before that effort, our designers had kept most information in their heads, like tribal knowledge, and he pushed them to write it down and systematize it. The goal was to revamp the whole process of store planning to achieve quicker development, lower cost, and better designs.

Before we hired Wright, our people in the field had been trying to pare down our costs on a per-project basis. But Wright recognized that the big savings would come only if we took advantage of our size and scale. Building hundreds of stores a year gave us tremendous buying power that we had never really leveraged. So we centralized buying, developed standard contracts and fixed fees, and revised our relations with contractors, promising large volumes of work to those who kept costs under control.

But that wasn’t enough. What we needed to do was to learn a few lessons from the cookie cutters. Our retail operations group outlined exactly the minimum amount of equipment each core store needed, and the design group worked with purchasing to pre-order and pre-stock standard items at 20 or 30 percent lower cost by getting volume discounts direct from the vendors. That meant finding warehouse space or implementing complex just-intime delivery. For parts needed in every store, such as drawers for whole-bean coffee or the espresso bar, we were able to standardize the sizes and cuts, so that we could order in bulk. Any odd spaces could be covered with filler panels. The goal was to develop processes that didn’t enslave designers but helped them be more creative.

Although modular case work is usually the kiss of death for good design, we found a way to make it work for us. In 1996, we revamped our computer system and developed new software that helped us fit in standard equipment and fixtures and estimate costs as the design evolved. By taking advantage of our size and coordinating our operations needs with our design goals, we were able to cut store development time from twenty-four to eighteen weeks and reduce the average store costs significantly. That freed up the resources we needed for a more fulfilling project: designing our Stores of the Future.

Wright’s goal was to raise our store design to a higher level, leaping ahead of our competitors. He aimed to create a lyrical and esthetic new design, with richness and texture, strong enough to tell the Starbucks story, going beyond just a revised new color scheme, another kind of wood, or a new style of chairs, and trying to capture the essence of the Starbucks experience. He directed his creative team to draw from culture and mythology to weave a fantastic tale.

“Good design is not pretty colors,” Wright likes to say. “It’s putting something out of reach and making people go get it.”

To get the creative juices flowing, we set up a “secret” studio, deep in the recesses of the Starbucks Center building in Seattle and hired a team of artists, architects, and designers to fashion our next generation of stores. Few knew of the studio’s existence. Only a handful of people had keys, and others had to sign nondis-closure forms to be admitted. We kept the project hush-hush so we’d have a major impact when the new designs were released in late 1996.

Dave and I met with the Store-of-the-Future design team early on, explaining our vision for what Starbucks should be: an authentic coffee experience, an extension of the front porch, an enriching, rewarding environment that could accommodate both fast service and quiet moments. Then the designers took it further, doing research about sirens, as seductive and unpredictable as coffee itself, and about Starbuck, the level-headed first mate. They explored the mythology of the sea, the idea of the Third Place, and the art and literature of coffee culture throughout the ages. They learned about coffee blends and origin countries. The designs they created try to convey these themes subliminally, through murals and icons and other images.

They got rid of everything stiff and hard-edged, and brought in romance and mythology, mellowness and warmth, using contemporary production processes to capture an eclectic, handmade look. But they kept my original vision of the artistry of espresso-making, spotlighting it by placing the machine behind a rounded bar and creating a wooden “hand-off” plane where baristas could place finished drinks ready for customers.

Rather than opt for a simple, uniform look, they evolved complex variations on the four elements of earth, fire, water, and air, by relating them to the four stages of coffeemaking: grow, roast, brew, and aroma. That allowed for four different store designs, each with its own color palette, lighting scheme, and component materials, yet all unified by an overarching concept. Grow, for instance, highlights shades of green. Roast combines deep reds and rich browns. Brew emphasizes blue, for water, and brown, for the coffee. Aroma uses a light color palette with yellows, greens, and whites. All of the concepts incorporate natural textures, hand-blown light fixtures, and suspended ceiling elements based on organic shapes. Within these four basic templates, we can vary the materials and specific details to adapt them to different settings, from downtown buildings to suburban areas to college towns.

For the people involved, the process was gut-wrenching, with wide swings of morale, redefinition of roles, and reexamination of core values, like a rebirth of Starbucks. They were, after all, messing with the image I had carefully composed for Starbucks. Wright says he wondered, some days, if he was going to get fired or shot for the revolution he was trying to bring about. At times progress was slow and agonizing, and some early concepts either went too far or didn’t have enough edge. But I made a point of stepping back from the team’s work and letting their imaginations run.

I remember how I felt when I walked around the mock-up stores in our fifth-floor studio to see the final design concepts. Arthur and Wright were with me, but I didn’t want to have any discussions or listen to any explanations. I simply wanted to immerse myself in the mood the team had created. What I saw reflected a level of creativity and artistry so far above what we had come from, that original Il Giornale design.

The artists showed me icons they had developed, using variations on the shape of the siren, for use in the stores, and an entirely redesigned set of stamps to identify our coffees. The end result was a series of images so original and imaginative that I felt a sense of awe at the kind of talent we were able to inspire. Some of these images appear in this book.

“This is great,” I said. “Hurry up and get it into our new stores.”

Once the new store prototypes were approved, we faced the challenge of finding ways to build them within the strict budget that had been set for existing stores. That meant negotiating contracts with a different set of vendors and suppliers. By June 1996 Wright and his team had figured a way to purchase more than 300 items directly from vendors, lowering our overall investment costs by 10 percent.

The final plans, rolled out in late 1996, included four formats and four palettes. Our typical 1,400-square-foot Core A stores, with flexible seating areas and a complete selection of merchandise, can use any of the four color palettes and designs. Core B stores, formatted for smaller spaces, emphasize spatial efficiency. They draw on the same four design palettes, but cost less to build.

We also introduced two new formats: the breve bar and the doppio. Breve bars are designed as a store-within-a-store in supermarkets or office building lobbies, and are compact enough to fit into sites previously considered too small for a full-sized Starbucks. Doppios, named for a double shot of espresso, are the smallest outlet, fitting into an approximately 8-foot-square space. They are self-contained and can be easily relocated. Both the smaller units use the same style and finishes as the larger stores.

Given the apparently contradictory tasks of lowering costs while creating a better design, Wright’s team not only accomplished that but also a third: devising novel formats that would allow sales in locations we never could have considered before.

It wasn’t just the “cookie-cutter” criticism that drove the Store-of-the-Future effort in 1995 and 1996. We were reaching higher than that. But this experience is typical of the way Starbucks reacts. If there’s a problem, we try not only to fix it but to create something innovative and elegant in the process.