Urbanite
Cup of Luxury
Bryan-David Scott
TEXT BY KARENA GUPTON AKHAVEINH
In the early years of his life, Bryan-David Scott was a championship boxer. Today, he is a heavy hitter in a different ring,
namely, in the arena of ultra-luxury coffee. “There are a lot of
ways to deliver a knockout punch,” says the soft-spoken but
clearly impassioned Scott, “and I believe that the experience of
drinking my coffee for the first time is one of those.”
How does a boxer become a luxury coffee purveyor? After a
stint with the police, Scott, who throughout his interview comes
across as the ultimate Renaissance man, entered the world of
direct sales as a furniture broker. He proved effective at using
e-commerce to bypass the show rooms and sell below retail in
a furniture market that was beginning to show signs of suffering from the economic slowdown. When the furniture industry
crashed in 2006, Scott asked himself, “What is it that I am truly
passionate about? What can I sell every day rather than every
few years?” Coffee immediately came to mind. However, Scott
feared that Seattle, where he was living at the time, was a saturated market. Two in-depth studies later, he concluded that
Seattle was not as saturated as he had initially thought. “People
were tired of drinking mediocre stuff,” he says, explaining his
decision to aim for the top quality possible. How to achi ]