Amid the quiet hum of a coffee shop in Liverpool, a group of people sheltering from the bitter cold outside are chatting away.
I’ve just arrived to meet Jack Brewitt, founder of 92 Degrees Coffee, which has grown from this shop on Hardman Street to 22 locations nationwide – including its first franchised store on this very day in Birmingham.
A man with a rucksack peels away from the group: it is Jack, who has been catching up with his customers, and everyone seems very much at home here.
Later we will discuss the “long play” of connecting up brand recognition from his coffee shops to products in retail stores. Everything begins with that comfortable experience – and, of course, the taste of a delicious coffee.
“We serve 1-2 million customers a year and so you hope that the majority of their visits are good, happy and tasty,” says Jack. “Then when they go to their local supermarket, they might go: ‘I’ve had a coffee from there. I’ll take a bag of that home.”
Jack has grand plans for 92 Degrees, which I’ll come to later. But let’s start at the beginning: even before he and four co-founders had the idea of turning this space into their first store.
Dyslexia
Taking my first sip of a very welcome cappuccino – it’s labelled ‘Damn Fine Coffee’ with good reason – I am surprised to learn that Jack, who on first hearing doesn’t have a strong Scouse accent, grew up 200 metres from this very spot.
“I struggled hugely with dyslexia when I was growing up,” he tells me. “So my parents decided to send me to a school in Shropshire which provided a very good special needs education. That was where I began to understand the problems that I had with reading and writing.
“Numbers were always fine and easy – my dad was a physics teacher – and when I did a dyslexia test at eight or nine years old, my maths was that of a 16- or 17-year-old, but my reading age was more like a three-year-old.
f“Some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world are dyslexic. It makes you think, and learn how to do stuff: the smartest kids that became my friends at school, they had A* grades, but they couldn’t dream of running a business.
“When you have to dig deeper to just pass or get through exams, you build resilience which comes in very useful later on.”
Everton deal
The young Jack has always been fascinated by business and so, when he returned to live with his parents in Liverpool, he started up a venture importing goalposts from China which were less dangerous if they fell on a child.
“I sat at my mum and dad’s kitchen table and just sent email after email, trying to sell to people. And it was very, very hard,” he recalls.
“I won a contract in principle with Everton to supply the goalposts to their training ground – but then the manufacturer couldn’t deliver the order! That was a kick in the teeth for an 18-year-old kid.”
Controlling the supply chain was a lesson he heeded when he set up 92 Degrees.
Draw & Code
After three years of the goalposts business, he decided he’d had enough and began to work as a labourer on the very building we are sitting in today.
“I wanted to learn about buildings and earn again – get away from the safety net of my parents,” says Jack. “One day I showed some people around who were interested in letting out a space, and that turned out to be Draw & Code.”
The immersive tech studio has built a global reputation from its Liverpool base within a stone’s throw of our interview. Jack was part of a team that helped them fit out the office, and before long he was working for them.
“I became fixated with what they were doing. So after my work here, I would sit in their office and just learn about technology – they were building some of the most incredible stuff,” he says.
“I then worked for them for two years raising capital, selling, looking after investors. I went out to Silicon Valley and pitched to every VC (venture capital) firm I could find.
“I pitched at Apple’s head office and went to Meta’s and Google’s; I stood in front of some of the cleverest people on the planet and talked to them about technology that was being created in Liverpool.
“Then I opened a coffee shop.”
92 Degrees Coffee shop on Hardman Street
92 Degrees is born
When they suggested opening a coffee shop in this then-empty space, Jack jumped at the chance to invest with them and run it.
“The plan was to do six weeks of trade then meet at the pub down the road to discuss how everything was going. I had been in here every single day and it was busy. I thought: ‘We are all geniuses and we’ve got to go build more of these!’
“I went to the meeting so excited, but they all said no – and I was genuinely gutted. We are still close friends but it wasn’t really their long-term ambition to build a coffee shop business.
“I walked home to my mum and dad’s, and set out a plan to earn as much money as I possibly could in the next three or four years to buy them out then begin building more stores.”
Social Chain
A meeting with Steven Bartlett and Dominic McGregor, co-founders of influencer marketing agency Social Chain, ended without a contract for Draw & Code – but instead a job offer for Jack.
“They offered me three times my salary! I couldn’t believe it,” he recalls. “I was the first commercial person within the media side of the business, and that team grew quite quickly. I became the client director there.”
After earning enough money to buy out his 92 Degrees co-founders, he left Social Chain to open its second location on Jamaica Street. A third soon followed and all performed strongly.
“When we got to three or four sites, we had to upscale our production with a bigger machine. When we got to 10 or 11 stores, we had to do it again; and then again when we reached 20 stores!
“From my earliest perspective, roasting our own coffee was an entirely commercial decision because of my lack of experience. Now it’s a control over the main ingredient.
“The commercial side speaks for itself, but the product standard is so important to me. We spend hours and hours and hours cupping different coffees from different places around the world, and I love it.”
Roastery
On a trip to the head office and roastery down by Brunswick Docks I see bowls and bowls of coffee beans laid out and labelled in the working kitchen.
‘Coffee shop’ inside 92 Degrees HQ
Jack shows me the sacks of greenish beans which are bought from around the world and demonstrates the 15-minute technique of roasting and cooling them in the firm’s original machine.
He says he finds the process of roasting beans therapeutic. “It starts from point zero and always finishes at the same point. Most jobs as an entrepreneur never really finish: they are continuous, frothy and messy, and things can go wrong at any time.
“I’ve done 12, 13, 14 hours of roasting a day. I absolutely love it. If I had a choice, I would just do that!
“But obviously there’s other things to do as well… and there are better people than me at roasting!”
Revenue streams
92 Degrees is tracking £10 million revenue this year, with the eCommerce and wholesale sides of the business playing their part. As well as supplying local hotels, coffee shops and restaurants, bags of its coffee are now sold into 32 countries.
Jack says that COVID prompted a huge increase in eCommerce sales overnight.
“I remember sitting in our shop and outside there wasn’t a person, a car, a bus… nothing. I thought five years of work and all my money had just gone down the drain.
“I made the call to close about a week and a half before the government mandated everywhere to do so. I told all of my team that they were going to get paid for as long as possible, which would have pretty much cleared out the bank account in a very short amount of time when subsequently we were trying to grow.
“I had some of the most amazing messages from team members: they brought me to tears, people offering their time to do stuff – clean the stores for free or whatever we needed. People who genuinely cared.
“Then our online business grew by 10,000% overnight.”
They had no infrastructure for that level of delivery of direct-to-consumer product, and he admits it was a shock to the system.
“I did a lot of the roasting in the first month or so. We’d bag it up, stick it in the back of my car and drive it to the Royal Mail to be sent.
“Then we suddenly started to get the hang of it. The processes and procedures follow out of necessity.”
Expansion… in lockdown?!
Having negotiated down the leases on his closed stores, to the surprise of team members, landlords and everyone else, Jack took the opportunity to agree deals on locations in new cities.
“A lot of people thought it was a very stupid risk, because no one knew that we were going to pull out the back of COVID.
“Landlords couldn’t believe that there was an operator wanting more locations! We started COVID with four or five stores, and doubled that over the pandemic.
“When things began to return to normal, our online business slowly dropped – but our in-store revenue started to grow. And all of a sudden, we had a proper business.”
Franchising
Jack is taking part in GM Business Growth Hub’s ASCEND Scale Up Programme. He says that alongside its home city, 92 Degrees now has locations in Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Birmingham, with the latter the site of its first franchise.
Growing the franchise model and rail station locations is the current priority, while also getting listed in retailers across the UK.
“I want to build the company to 100 locations in the UK in the next four to five years,” says Jack. “I can’t see that being a company that will be valued at less than £100m if operating the team I want.
“And if that’s the case, I want to then give our initial investors the opportunity to be able to exit if they want to.”
These unnamed angels are patient investors who are not pushing for a multiple return in a specific timeframe. Jack still owns the majority of the business.