Today we’d like to introduce you to Joel Norman.
Joel, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
My brother, Charles and I have always loved coffee – not just the product, but the industry. The people. The culture. Whenever we travel, we spend half of our time doing what we’ve dubbed the Tour de Coff – where we visit a local shop, drink some coffee, eat a pastry, rinse, repeat. Sometimes we’ll hit three shops before noon. Talk about Jitter Central.
I remember when Charles was planning his honeymoon, he spent most of his time researching what city had the best hikes and cafes, rather than which all-inclusive resort had the best margs and spas. The idea of opening a cafe has always been in our minds, but we didn’t want to start without knowing what we were doing. We wanted to work our way there. Also, we were broke, so really, we had to work our way there. We both jumped into the industry together.
I got a barista job, then that same company hired Charles. When we felt like we needed more of a challenge, I started working at Chattahoochee Coffee (a cafe that serves Counter Culture Coffee), and Charles soon did the same. We were incredibly lucky to get to work with and for such amazing people at Counter Culture and Chattahoochee, and couldn’t possibly be where we are without them. Though my time at Chattahoochee has been nothing shy of a dream job, the goal has always been to open a cafe, and so begins the story of Bellwood.
After years of dreaming, planning, researching, naming, renaming, sketching, and high-fiving, Charles and I met some friends that blew our minds and began a partnership with them. One of them, Ben Shaum, has years of roasting experience (roasting coffee, not people. Ben is the kind one here) under his belt, and feels the same about people as we do. The other, Tommy Keough, is a killer freelance designer, who loved our ideas enough to join the team as our brand manager and content designer (and has much more experience roasting people than coffee).
The four of us put together a crowdfunding campaign to get things moving and met our goal in the first 13 of the given 30 days (and yes, we kicked ourselves for not asking for more, not because we’re greedy but because starting a business always costs more than you expect. Or maybe we’re greedy. I don’t know. We just want this thing to work out, ok? Coffee is really freaking cool, and we think everyone should benefit from it.)
We’ve been blown away by the amount of love and support that we’ve received from the communities around us, and again, we literally could not have done it on our own. And now here we are, roasting and packaging coffee for accounts that like our coffee enough to sell it to their customers. It’s an unbelievable thing. I’m sure one day it will feel normal. Or maybe it will always be this magical.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I’m not naive enough to think that this is going to be an easy thing to do. I’ve got a lot of big dreams, and so does the rest of the team. Big dreams are usually met with some friction. Dwight Schrute didn’t become manager of Dunder Mifflin on his first try.
In fact, he lost out to Andy, Nellie, Robert California, AND Deangelo Vickers along the way. Maybe I’m stressing this too much, but we feel so supported by the people around us. We’ve been lucky not to have needed to cross a bridge that wasn’t there. This is a brand new company, so maybe the struggles are just around the corner. Or maybe I just get so excited about new things that I forget about the hard parts that we have encountered. I’ve been known to do that. That might be it.
Here’s a fun one: when Charles and I were brewing 200 cups coffee for our first Bellwood event, we had to rig our Fetco brewer to fit my dryer outlet and run the water line for our washing machine to the coffee machine. Knowing little to nothing about electrical engineering or plumbing, we thought for sure we would either burn down the house or flood it. To our amazement, when we turned everything on, no explosions happened, nobody died, and we felt like heroes.
Please tell us about Bellwood Coffee.
Bellwood is a specialty coffee company dedicated to treating people like people. We want our guests to feel like a million bucks when they visit us. We want our coffee to taste like sweet MJ melodies. We share profits with our employees so that when the company does well, they do too. We find traceable coffees from importers who are paying farmers what their coffees are worth.
We’re helping move the coffee industry forward in Atlanta by being efficient, innovative and inclusive. Nobody gets left out. Coffee is about so much more than a tasty product, but if you don’t have that, then it’s hard to accomplish anything. So we start there. With a delicious cup of coffee that would blow anyone’s mind. And then we move forward, having seen firsthand all that coffee can do.
This sweet bean can create a connection between people. Coffee is a medium of human interaction. It’s a meeting place for souls. It’s a thing like no other. We want to foster the environment that encourages coffee to do all that it does.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
I’m one of 6 kids, 5 of which are boys, so we used to do a lot of dumb things of which our mom would never have approved. One of these things involved a plastic kiddie pool, a long, thick rope, a skateboard ramp, and a big hill in our backyard. We put the skateboard ramp at the top of the steepest part of the hill, facing downwards.
One brave soul would sit in the kiddie pool and lean back against the middle of the rope, the ends of which were being held by the two strongest kids in the group. They would then run and pull the rope, slingshotting the passenger of the kiddie pool up the skateboard ramp and launching him into midair. He would then proceed to fly toward the bottom of the hill, landing with just enough room to slide into safety without an abrupt crash. We really did this. No helmets, no pads.
The venture ended with me deciding to try it standing up in the kiddie pool, and shortly afterward fracturing my coccyx against a rock at the bottom of the hill and thinking that I crapped my pants because that’s what fracturing your coccyx makes you feel like. That part wasn’t fun. But I like to forget the pain and retain the rest of the memory.
Contact Info:
- Website: Bellwoodcoffee.com
- Email: joel@bellwoodcoffee.com
- Instagram: @bellwoodcoffee
- Facebook: facebook.com/bellwoodcoffee
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/bellwoodcoffee
Image Credit:
Ian Palmer, Charles Norman
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