We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Chris Reese a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Chris, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
In March of 2018, I was diagnosed with a progressive case of psoriasis that radically changed my life forever. After months of traditional treatment without much relief and success, I decided to fight this autoimmune disease through natural healing and lifestyle change. A major proponent of that lifestyle change was deciding to leave the career that I had been doing for over 10 years because it wasn’t bringing joy to my life. My wife Lindsay and I always wanted to start a business, so we decided to start dreaming of all of the possible businesses that we would want to create. During this process, we made the decision to move closer to family to our hometown of Hagerstown, MD. We loved everything about our hometown except for the lack of high quality restaurants and coffeeshops that we had experienced in our days living in Savannah, GA and Baltimore, MD. We both spent hours a day at the local coffeeshops in these cities, spending time with friends, having business meetings, going on a date, etc. We loved the community aspect of the cafe and both of our jobs highly involved social/community engagement. Our hometown didn’t have a coffeeshop that we had experienced elsewhere, and we really wanted that, so we decided to build one. We had no idea how to start a business, we had never worked in a coffeeshop before, and we had very little money! Over the course of a year, we thought ourselves how to build a business plan, raise capital to build out a brick and mortar in our City Square, and launch our very first coffeeshop in the heart of Downtown Hagerstown.
Chris, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
We are a 2 location coffeeshop/roastery in Hagerstown, MD. My wife Lindsay and I started Cannon Coffee because we love the coffee industry and we wanted to build a place in our hometown that was beautiful, engaging, and invited people to build community. One thing that sets us apart from other places in the area is our focus on customer experience and relationships. We establish and train our staff to ensure that our space has a friendly and welcoming environment. We focus on sustainability by using compostable goods and services. We are transparent about our ingredients that we use, where our products come from, and are always trying to go local whenever possible. One unique fact about our shops are we are entirely gluten-free. Our housemade waffles, toasts, and pastries are all made in a safe and celiac friendly environment. We pride ourselves on developing recipes that don’t taste “gluten-free” so when someone that doesn’t have an allergy to gluten is shocked when they find out that it’s gluten-free.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
When COVID 19 happened, Downtown Hagerstown was a complete ghost town. Downtown has been in a revitalization period and has very few residential near so when Downtown businesses and schools either closed or went remote, we had to kick into creative mode. We didn’t have an online ordering store at the time, so we immediately launched our online ordering site with curbside pickup. This was huge for us at the height of COVID and is still 25% of our daily revenue. I never wanted to do delivery because of the lack of quality control when you pass it off to a delivery service. During COVID 19, I started personally delivering orders to people within a 20 mile radius. This gave us an opportunity to retain customers who weren’t coming downtown at the moment and gain new customers that don’t really go downtown.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
In 2022, we started moving towards opening our second location in Downtown Martinsburg, WV. We thought this was the perfect next move for us. Downtown Martinsburg was currently going through a revitalization process like Hagerstown which we love being apart of, we had a small community of customers that we knew traveled to our Hagerstown location, and there was need for our type of coffeeshop. We found the perfect place right in the heart of the city. The space was grand, with original colonial architecture, and felt perfect for our 2nd location. We negotiated a very a reasonable price for rent started pressing forward. As quickly as this happened, is when everything started to fall apart. Almost every other day, we found something structurally wrong with the space which was the responsibility of the landlord. Weeks and months would go by before something would get fixed or addressed. Then, we found out the landlord was selling the property and wasn’t telling us. At this point, we hadn’t had AC in the building for 2 months and were completely drained of our passion to build this shop all together. Long story short, the landlord agrees to our cancelation of the lease and we both more our separate ways. We were devastated and completely unenthused about finding another location in Martinsburg and restarting the process. In August 2022, we decided to press the pause button on expansion, and it was the best decision we ever made. A few months later in December, our roaster at Stageline Coffee Roasters told us he was leaving Stageline because of a disagreement with his partner. Clayton was the mastermind behind the business and I loved working with him. He was smart, passionate, and loved the coffee industry for every reason I did. With no plan in hand, I asked him, “Want to join forces?”. About 3 months later in March, 2023, we signed the lease for our second location in Hagerstown, MD which pairs as our roastery. Clayton is now our head roaster and has expanded our business in a whole new way. If it wouldn’t have been for the time we took to make sure we were making the right decision in Martinsburg, we would have missed this perfect next opportunity.
Contact Info:
- Website: cannoncoffee.co
- Instagram: cannoncoffeemd
- Facebook: cannoncoffeemd
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/cannon-coffee-hagerstown
Image Credits
Alyssa Phillips Grace Short