Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Tejeda.
Hi Alex, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
When I was still in college, I hated studying in the library and at home so I made coffee shops my go-to spots to get work done. I started to develop an appreciation for every shop I was going to. Aside from the coffee, they all had something unique to offer that really made them stand out individually. Their aesthetic, ambience, drinks, the way the baristas interacted with the customers and so on… it all just really fascinated me. At some point, I started to romanticize owning a little coffee shop of my own. As a broke college student, I realized I was spending way too much money on coffee so I saved up and bought an espresso machine to start making my own at home. I started playing with ratios, recipes and watching youtube videos on everything and anything associated with coffee. I wanted to dive deeper into this world of coffee I was so infatuated with so I would travel to these coffee conventions/festivals in LA, San Francisco, Seattle and even went to one in London where I met all these incredible people who also had a love for the craft. I sat down with various owners of different coffee shops to try and pick their brains about how they got started and would take any advice they offered along the way.
I graduated college in 2017 with the hope of getting into Medical School but things were just not going the way I wanted them to so I changed course completely and continued to work to figure out what my next venture was. Coffee was always on the side, I never really thought I was going to be able turn it into a business. Family and friends encouraged me to start something but there was always the fear of things never turning out the way I wanted them to and failing. I was working full-time at a big tech company in 2019 and I told myself if I really wanted to do some r&d I needed to work at a specialty coffee shop to learn about what people were drinking these days, what the most popular milk were, do people enjoy black coffee more versus vanilla lattes, etc… I ended up picking up a part-time job on the side at a coffee shop only working about 1-2 shifts a week. I was there for about six months until I left both jobs in January of 2020 to officially launch White Sparrow Coffee. I started emailing so many markets, business offices, festivals and I got turned away by a majority of them because I was too new and/or I never got responses back from them. The only event that was willing to take me was this vegan food fair called Vegan Playground. It was the first time I was ever going to pop up as an actual business and I got so much anxiety that I almost canceled but my friends stuck by my side and did the pop-up with me. The first event went so well we continued to do multiple pop-ups until COVID-19 officially had shut everything down. There was nothing we could do and like most businesses we just didn’t know what was going to happen. I had to put a pause on the coffee cart and got a full-time job until I thought about what the next step was.
A couple of months into the job, I started feeling miserable and I quit to try to start the coffee cart back up. I had no plan whatsoever but I knew if I put myself in a place of uncertainty and risk it would push me to just figure it out. Down the street from where I live is this quaint and little historical town called Old Town Tustin. I always wanted to open up my own shop in that area to introduce specialty coffee, despite there being maybe 3 or 4 other shops they were all just your typical old-school coffee house. As I was walking down the street in that little town, I came across a building that used to be an old consignment shop. There was a sign that said for lease and I immediately called the landlord to get some more info on it. Long story short, it was such an old building that the landlord advised us against it due to the fact that the city would make it difficult for us to make any modifications to a historical building. We ended up passing on it and maybe about a month later, the landlord calls us back to tell us a bookstore was moving in and they wanted a mobile coffee bar inside their shop. We worked out a leasing agreement with them for about a year and we bootstrapped the entire thing. We tried to get a health permit but it was impossible to do so. With all the restrictions they were enforcing on such a small setup we figured it wasn’t worth the hassle and we operated without it the entire year. We also didn’t put any signage outside of the bookstore for us because we didn’t want to attract too much attention from the city or county so it was sometimes hard to find us.
Once our yelp page and online presence started to grow people knew exactly where to look for us. It was so labor intensive and because we had no access to water, I had to fill up 10-gallon water tanks every day and bring them to the bookstore to be able to operate. I also had no storage at the shop so I had to turn my living room into a storage unit to be able to keep all my product there and transport it back and forth day in and day out. I did this every single day for a whole year. It was so exhausting but we had such a big following for how small we were that we quickly outgrew the space we were in. I needed to figure something else out because I knew I couldn’t keep this up for another year. Right across the street from us was this 50-year-old barbershop that was closing down. Despite how small the space was I knew it was better than nothing and I reached out to the landlord. He was stoked about what we were doing but told me he had to turn me down and give the space to another tenant that was going to go in and renovate it to continue to cut hair. I was pretty bummed and figured I would just continue searching.
A week later I get a call from the landlord and he tells me that the previous tenant had backed out and it was all mine if I wanted it, but I only had 3 days to make a decision. I had no plan, no contractor, barely any funds, and I didn’t even really know if that space was feasible for a coffee shop to workout. I said screw it; I’ll figure it out and signed the lease. We left the bookstore to start construction and what should have taken us no more than four months took us 10 months due to a horrible contractor. In the end, the contractor that we had hired completely ghosted us and left all this unfinished work that my Dad and I had to take over. In the midst of construction, I got a call from a friend that told me about a huge music festival coming up in April and that they were looking for a coffee vendor. I immediately said yes without thinking of the logistics because I was running low on funds for the buildout of the shop and I knew that would have given us some cushion to be able to carry us through the end. We had gone through the majority of the small loan we had pulled out and I even maxed out a couple of credit cards to try to get the shop done. The music festival we had gotten invited to was Coachella.
I was so hyped on it but I had never done an event of that size so the stress and anxiety that I had gone through the last month before the festival was unreal, I remember I got sick for about a week just panicking over how I was going to be able to pull this off. I grabbed my good group of friends that came through for me and helped me plan it all out. The festival came and we crushed it! In between both weekends, I would drive back from coachella to continue to work on construction of the shop and stocking up on more products for the second weekend. Once that was all over it was just a race to get the shop open. We went through numerous inspections, failing all of them until we eventually passed. Once we did, I opened up two days later on July 9th, of 2022. Since then, our team has grown and so has our community. I love what we do and I’m grateful for the people that come in every day to support us.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The challenges I faced were undoubtedly some of the hardest things I have ever experienced in my life but every single one was a learning lesson. Trying to find a space for us took quite some time and once we did, we had to figure out how to fit an entire shop into a 360 sq foot room. Contractor delays, running low on money and having to max out credit cards just to keep us afloat. Planning to operate at one of the biggest music festivals in the world with only a month’s notice while in the middle of trying finish building out our shop. Getting shut down by covid during our coffee cart days and figuring out how to continue to sell coffee during the lockdowns.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about White Sparrow Coffee?
We are a specialty coffee shop serving up uniquely crafted drinks. We source a lot of our ingredients from all over the world as well as coffee from specialty coffee roasters across the US and Europe. We invite other small businesses into our shop to have their own pop-ups and just like how I started I want to be able to give them an opportunity to share their passions with the community. I came from working for big companies such as Disney, Apple, and Google and the biggest thing I took from working at all those companies is knowing to how to put people first. Realizing that kindness and being an overall genuine human being goes along way. Putting out an excellent product with impeccable detail and building a solid team of individuals that can deliver a personalized experience to every single person that walks in through our doors. We’re doing more than just making coffee, I believe that coffee shops are turning into these social hubs and communities of people that just enjoy great coffee and great conversations.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
One of my favorite podcasts is How I Built This with Guy Raz. To hear all the stories of the beginnings of each founder of these now multi-billion dollar companies and the struggles that they also went through to get to where they’re at now is very inspiring.
Contact Info:
- Website: whitesparrowcoffee.com
- Instagram: whitesparrowcoffee
