Ref. 3 · Founder Stories · Power reserve 1 min
The Morning Howard Schultz Walked Into an Italian Espresso Bar and Saw the Future
In 1983, Starbucks was a small Seattle roaster with four stores. Howard Schultz was its head of marketing. Then the company sent him to an international housewares show in Milan — and everything changed.
It was like an epiphany. It was so immediate and physical that I was shaking. I had a vision — I saw Starbucks not for what it was, but for what it could be.
Howard Schultz, Pour Your Heart Into It
What Schultz saw in those Italian espresso bars wasn’t just coffee. It was community. The baristas knew every customer by name. People lingered, talked, connected. The coffee was almost secondary to the experience of belonging.
Schultz brought this vision back to Seattle, but the Starbucks founders weren’t interested in serving drinks. They were roasters, purists. So Schultz left and started his own chain, Il Giornale. Two years later, when the original owners decided to sell, Schultz scraped together $3.8 million to buy Starbucks and merged the two companies.
From 11 stores in 1987 to over 35,000 worldwide — all because one man walked into a Milan espresso bar and saw what coffee could become when you wrapped it in a sense of place.
