Three Years of Tala
Today marks the three year anniversary of Tala.
We’ve told accounts of the story of starting Tala before (you can read it here), but today I’m reminded of the very first day of our launch on June 7th, 2017.
We had all been working on Tala full-time since March, tirelessly establishing our values, our brand, our products and dreaming of the future we would create. We knew that launching without a cafe meant that we had to have our brand and our product be compelling and impressive from the start. Most companies that start with just roasting coffee don’t make it very far, so we knew if we were going to be the exception we had to make a really good first impression.
The weeks leading up to the official launch day were filled with sample roasting, photographing, writing, proofreading, equipment purchasing and plan-making. Each of our individual expertise was needed to land the plane safely, and seeing all come together was so exciting.
We had a small snag in the delayed shipping of our roaster. We had our roastery all put together, our bags designed and ordered, our contracts with local farmers markets signed and ready, we had wholesale clients ready eager to try our coffee; we even had all our coffee delivered but no way to roast it. Almost everything was on pause as we waited for the single most important part of our infrastructure to arrive. The day it finally did arrive we hit the ground running finishing everything we needed to before launch.
The night before the launch I was up all night putting the finishing touches on the website, which I made live at 6am, right when our booth at the Ravinia Farmers Market was opening up. That morning we served our coffee to the public for the first time. It was a little anticlimactic because no one at the market knew who we were or that we were a brand new company. In fact I had a conversation with someone recently who visited us that first day—he’s now a regular at our cafe—who was surprised to hear that that was our first day. “I thought you had been established for a long time already,” he said. That is, after all, exactly what we were going for. It was nice to hear all these months later.
The surreality of that moment was enhanced, I’m sure, by my lack of sleep, but it all solidified in a moment when we had our first online order from our website. I was sitting on a cooler in our market tent when I got the notification that morning—and then several after that. That felt like the first real evidence that we were becoming what we had hoped to.
That day began a whole host of “firsts” for us. First time selling a bag of coffee, first time being featured in the press, first time hiring a Tala employee, first time opening a cafe. We had talked about each one before launching, looking forward to each as a benchmark of our progress. We’re still hitting firsts today, actually. Every one is exciting and reminds me how worthwhile our hard work has been.