Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Bri Huskins. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Bri, thanks for joining us today. Almost every entrepreneur we know has considered donating a portion of their sales to an organization or cause – how did you make the decision of whether to donate? We’d love to hear the backstory if you’re open to sharing the details.

Before Covid, we had a really cool buy 1 give 1. For every 1 bag of organic coffee sold, we donate 1 dollar to CHOC hospital to fund their CHOC coffee cart – a volunteer service which visits each floor and provides free coffee to patients families. We have two little boys of our own (one born a 3 pound premie), so we’ve been frequent flyers at CHOC. From top to bottom we’ve always been amazed with the care they give to patients and families. We partnered with CHOC while my husband Kent was playing for the Anaheim Ducks through different team events, so we’ve always known it was a special place, but it wasn’t until we personally experienced visits of our own that we realized how incredible it really was.

Bri, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’ve always been a creative person. I got my first job while in high school selling swim suits at Diane’s swimwear. I used to make these hair. accessories in my room and always wore them into work. It wasn’t long before people started asking if they could buy them. I’ll never forget the day I got a call at work from Diane herself asking if I could stop selling and start making accessories for her store. We did a trial at the first store, but soon after I became a vendor for all her stores. My mom and I set up shop in my parents garage and I worked as a vendor for Diane the rest of my high school days.. Since I already had this little business of mine, I decided the right college for me was FIDM (fashion institute for design and merchandising ). While studying there at the LA campus I met my husband Kent, who at the time was playing in the NHL for the Anaheim Ducks. I finished school and shortly after Kent and I got engaged. I tried to continue my accessory line as long as I could but with the hockey lifestyle it was tough. Traveling and trades made for any home base to be short lived. At that time in my life I had to sit back and enjoy the ride watching Kent fulfill his dream. It was an amazing experience watching him win a Stanley Cup and I’m forever grateful for the people it brought into our life, but I always missed having something of my own. We had our first baby around the time Kent retired from hockey…talk about major life changes! Before the NHL Kent graduated from Clarkson University with a business degree and had always said he wanted to start a business, give it a shot, even that meant it totally failed. After hockey, he thought long and hard about what he wanted to do next. It’s a pretty tough transition going from that level of hockey to nothing. I thought he might want to do something in the game…coach or scout, but he wanted try something together. He had his first sip of coffee (very late in life) while we were traveling in Europe and he instantly fell in love with espresso. When we got back to the states he went for one and was pretty caught off guard at the difference between coffee here in the states vs. there. He dove right in with this caffeine obsession and one day told me he wanted to fly to Sand Pointe Idaho for a roasting seminar. I thought he was nuts at the time but told him to go and feel it out. When he came home he said he wanted to purchase a giant roaster and start roasting our own coffee beans. I’d been a coffee drinker since the age 10 when I used to steal sips out of my Gandmas cup, so this was a concept I could totally get behind! We quickly searched for a space to rent to put this large machine we had on order. We opened our first ever Huskins Coffee Roastery in 2018 in Santa Ana, It was mainly the roaster but I was able to make good use of the rest the space and designed a little cafe. Fast forward to today and we now have our flagship store located on Balboa Island, Newport Beach and a quick cup little pick-up shop in East Side Costa Mesa. We learned a lot from our first shop…the good, the bad, and the ugly. So many things things we forgot to think about having no experience in the industry, but our main goal always remained the same. We wanted to make sure we served only high quality certified organic coffee. That was the main thing, the most. important thing to us. Getting certified was an obstacle of its own, and we hand clue how much more money it would cost to #1 get certified, and #2 stay certified, but we felt we had to stay true to ourselves and how we lived. We knew that coffee is one of the most sprayed crops next to cotton, and that we didn’t want any part of that. We wanted to be certified organic and roast in small batches.It goes beyond what we are putting into our bodies but is also important to the farms growing the beans. Organic farming creates a safe environment for the coffee farm employees and ensures no chemical run-off into the communities, or into your cup at home. Small batches allow us to make sure each bean is roasted evenly. Kent still roasts beans himself, and I still very much enjoy designing the spaces of our shops. Aside from the emphasis on being certified organic we also make all of our syrups in house, from scratch with real ingredients. Two of our most popular currently is the pumpkin latte made from real pumpkin puree and our all star best seller being the hometown latte. Hometown latte has Canadian maple syrup in it that comes straight off the tress sin Kents small hometown. When I tried to suggest. saving some cost and getting maple from here, Kent quickly assured me that there is no maple quite like the fresh maple from his hometown. And he was right…it’s got quite the following now! Our Balboa Island was our biggest undertaking but we couldn’t be happier over how it turned out, and the community bond it serves.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

There are a couple moments that come to mind when it comes to resilience. We opened our roastery in 2018 and it took us a full year and a half to get that shop off the ground and running at a speed that actually made legit income. We felt like we could finally take a breath and enjoy. The peace lasted all of 6 months before Covid hit and knocked us right back to square one. A good amount of our business had come from the surrounding office buildings and in a matter of days, that was down to zero as all these buildings were now empty. We had to quickly adapt and make big changes on the fly. We worked on streamlining all operations and placed a larger emphasis on our coffee roasting and online sales to help our business survive.

Another time that comes to mind is towards the end of 2021, when it felt like the world and business all around us were closing left and right and we had this strong urge to expand. It felt like a crazy thought, and pretty out of character for us to take. such a huge risk during such uncertain times, but when a Starbucks closed on charming Balboa Island leaving no real place to grab. a cup of coffee, we felt like we at least needed to. check it out. We ended up not liking the old Starbucks spot, but there was this darling space open across the street from it that instantly hooked us. It needed work from head to toe, and we knew we were going to have. put a lot of money into it to make our vision come to life, but we could very clearly see the potential and loved the community surrounding it would serve. It was one of the most terrifying decisions we had to make, but we crossed our fingers and took the big risk at the most unsettling time. The build out was painful, and we were up against the clock before we had to start paying rent on it. We didn’t make it. Build out took a year and we had to swallow a few months of rent without the doors open. It hurt at the time, but it ended up being worth it. We had a soft opening (meant for friends and family to get the tweaks out) in March 2022. We were expecting a little action but we weren’t prepared at all for the turnout when we opened the doors that morning. Apparently someone had leaked the soft opening on. the Next-door app and we ended up with a line wrapped around the corner at 6am. The support for local business was at an all time high and we couldn’t have been more grateful.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

We learned the importance of location vs. “if you build it, they will come”. With our first shop, we knew our location wasn’t great on it’s own (no other retail around, no parking, no foot traffic), so we invested in a beautiful buildout and top of the line equipment in the hopes that if we made it nice enough and good enough, that people would make the extra effort to come. This set us up for an extremely challenging uphill battle business-wise.
We learned that the old saying “location, location, location” could not have been more accurate and while choosing our second shop location, we had a better idea what to look for and landed on Balboa Island with tons foot traffic and other retail. The rent is more expensive but our biggest challenge since we opened there has been keeping up with demand… a much better problem to have.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.huskinscoffee.com
• Instagram: @huskins.coffee
• Facebook: Huskins Coffee
• Yelp: Huskins Coffee Balboa Island Huskins Coffee Costa Mesa. Huskins Coffee Santa Ana

Image Credits
Vivian Kim