We were lucky to catch up with Keia Booker recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Keia, thanks for joining us today. One of the most important things we can do as business owners is ensure that our customers feel appreciated. What’s something you’ve done or seen a business owner do to help a customer feel valued?

I developed an Equity Pricing Model (EP) so that our customers could live in their values around equity and community, as well as make our products more accessible to more people. Our EP model is a response to being told we needed to raise our prices in order to remain sustainable. I, as a consumer, sometimes feel that products are made to feel exclusive and I don’t feel welcomed to engage with those products. So, allowing our customers to choose from three different pricing structures helped us communicate to our people that they are welcome at Keia & Martyn’s because we believe everyone deserves goodness. I was able to use my background in People & Culture work, DEI, and nonprofits to ideate a solution for us and our customers that is both sustainable and directly tied to how we think about our business.

Keia, 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?

Keia & Martyn’s Coffee is a value-centered coffee roasting company with over 25 years of experience in the Portland coffee industry. As a couple, my husband and I very different people that bring our own lived experience and personality to our little coffee company. The results of our divergent ideations are pretty radical. Since we are so different, it makes our decisions about branding, direction and strategy more robust and intentional. Whether it’s building out profiles for different coffees, using an equity lens to purchase coffees, or designing and then creating all of our packaging and branding, our customers get the best of both worlds as it all merges together into this company. Our customers also get the experience of a highly curated and seasonal list of coffees from Africa, Latin America, and Oceania/Sunda Islands, all through the thoughtful lens of a barista and a roaster.

We provide freshly roasted coffee from one of the PNW’s only Black female roasters. We focused during the pandemic on our online subscription business but are now adding in other business models to diversify our offerings. Our Equity Pricing model is unique and built out of a desire to provide quality products for everyone, not just those of a certain status. The Equity Pricing model allows the customer the choice of three prices for all of our products, with each price helping to support and sustain our service. Specializing in coffee purchasing that is rooted in equity, regenerative farming practices, and providing living wages, I am really focused on putting our values and creativity into everything we do.

What sets us apart is our love story that originated in coffee and the way we approach our company. When Martyn first wanted to start this company as a subscription business, it was December of 2019. It ended up being a good time to start a coffee subscription business. I helped out peripherally with things like the website but I wasn’t directly engaged. After several months and seeing the business start to expand, Martyn approached me with joining the company. I had previously worked for some big names in Portland coffee and he knew my skills in that arena, I, however, had pivoted away from the coffee industry after not getting the opportunities that my colleagues were getting. I rarely saw people that looked like me in higher positions than barista or cafe manager. I told him the only way I would join him would be if he taught me everything he knew about roasting and I became the roaster for the business. He was game and the rest is history and our future. We have been able to collaborate on things like our Magic Dust Instant Coffee and opening up two cafes.

The other thing that stands out about Keia & Martyn’s Coffee is our willingness to dig into doing things ourselves, like our instant coffee. We are one of the only roasters that produces its own instant rather than sourcing the production elsewhere. This allows us to be flexible with our offerings instead of having to meet certain minimums. We carry a decaf instant, our 4-Track blend, a fruit forward single-origin African, and a chocolatey single-origin Latin. This ability to do this ourselves and harkens back to our belief that accessibility in key to our brand. It allows us to offer more for less money than our competitors and, of course, we offer our EP model for it as well.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

My mother is a hard knocks Folgers drinker. I would send her bags of coffee that I roasted but she didn’t have all the equipment or time to make my coffee, so she would often just stick to her routine. One time while visiting her in Oklahoma, I noticed that she was still drinking Folgers but she was now drinking it from a coffee pod. I realized that in order for me to truly share coffee that I roasted with my mother, I was going to have to make something easy to brew and that required little clean up or fuss.

I had had instant coffee from another local roaster that was so far beyond anything I thought instant coffee could be; acidic, fruity, floral, etc. I realized that if I could turn the coffee that we roasted into instant coffee then it would marry my quality centered approach with her convenience. So I began researching places that could take coffee that I roasted and turn it into instant. There were a couple of places across the country but there was one here in Oregon. So, my husband and I roasted up 100 lbs of coffee, rented a van, and drove three hours to deliver our coffee to a place called Viola. We were so excited to see what they would do with our beans. We waited and we waited. When we were within a week of the latest deadline that they gave us for delivery, I reached out to see when we could be expecting our delivery. After months of little communication on their end, they wrote back and said that we should be seeing it very soon. Then we received a generic email from the owner that said they were going out of business. We had purchased 100 lbs of coffee, rented time on a community roaster, rented a van, and spent many hours of our time processing and preparing for this coffee. We had even paid half the cost up front. Soon after my pleas to honor our purchase since it should have been completed and just needing to be shipped out, Viola and its owner were ghosts and we were over about $7k in the hole. We had only been in business for a little more than a year and this was a devasting blow.

After months of coming to terms that the amount of money we lost was nothing in comparison to some of the larger companies that had invested in Viola and that we were never going to see our money or our coffee, I had sort of given up the ghost and came to terms with being hoodwinked and not having a path for us to have an instant coffee. I casually mentioned to the owner of the cooperative roasting facility that we used that we tried to make an instant with Viola but had been taken for a ride with them. He had also been swindled by Viola. He mentioned, however, that there was a really kind roaster in Portland that produced his own instant. We were put in contact with Jason from Cascadia Coffee Roasters and he agreed to use us as a pilot program for producing instant for others like us. The first instant we had made from them was from a Colombian producer in Huila and it was beautiful. So, we contracted another round of instant. We soon realized that we really wanted to have the flexibility to say only make 50 lbs of a coffee or make multiple instants.

We reached out to Kiva, a micro community lending service, and secured a 0% interest loan that our community and a worldwide community of Kiva supporters could lend to and be a part of our vision. We secured our loan and proceeded to purchase several freeze dryers and began experimenting. After a lot of R&D, Martyn came out with a beautiful instant coffee that we were extremely proud of and it was completely ours. Since then we have expanded our line of instants to include an African, a Latin, our 4-Track Blend, and a Decaf. We call it Magic Dust. It is now one of our top selling products with people using it when they go camping, on vacation, and just when they want a quality cup of coffee but without all the fuss.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Keia & Marytn’s Coffee was not our original name. We got a state trademark for the name, Top Cup and we were Top Cup Roasters. We operated under that name for our first year of business. It wasn’t until we sought to trademark our name nationally that we found out about another cafe in Arizona had beaten us to the punch. Since we had already been serving customers with our subscription services nationwide it was imperative that we were able to trademark our name nationally. We worked with law students to see about other names but nothing was clicking. We only had access to the students for a limited time and they had already investigated a Top Cup trademark which was their assignment. We didn’t want that cafe to be able to potentially shut down our business or receive a cease and desist.

We realized that the names we were coming up with were getting further away from us and what we felt passionate about. One day when having one of our weekly brunch business meetings, we were pulled towards naming our company something that we connected to and that we thought our customers would connect to. We decided on Keia & Martyn’s Coffee. We both have unique names that no one could trademark (we learned this from our student advisors). It really opened up our brand to our customers too. We show up at cafes or markets, and people feel honored to be talking with the people they see on their packaging.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://keiaandmartynscoffee.com
• Instagram: @keia_and_martyns_coffee

Image Credits

Robbie Augspurger