Yoco sat down with Stephan to learn about his unconventional path into the coffee business and his community-driven strategy at its core.
Before Platō Coffee, CEO & Co-founder Stephan Bredell was never a coffee guy. “I’m an entrepreneur,” he says, “and coffee was the vehicle.” When Stephan launched Platō together with his brother Petrus Bredell in late 2019, he was working a full-time corporate job rebuilding after a few “bloody noses” he’d received in his quest to turn his many ideas into businesses throughout his early career. His idea for a coffee brand would have to be bootstrapped; Stephan on brand and Petrus on learning the craft of coffee roasting.
The brothers rented all the equipment they needed to start, and began selling coffee from a modified shipping container at a memorial site in Irene, a suburb that’s often referred to as a ‘village’ on the outskirts of Centurion. They’d only been trading a few months when in early 2020 the whole world shut down. There are many start-ups whose stories end with ‘and then COVID-19 hit’, but as Platō Coffee was operating from their container with an informal trader’s license, they found themselves in a legal loophole where they were permitted to trade.
After the first few weeks of heavy lockdown, when citizens were permitted outside of their homes between certain hours in the morning, something extraordinary started happening. Neighbours were lining up for coffees desperate for interaction with people they didn’t live with; hanging out, catching up, and sharing news. Stephan said he realised then that coffee was the conduit for connection, and that community would be what they were selling. “Somebody asked me the other day how this ‘community thing’ looks practically, and for me it’s a barista knowing your name and knowing your regular drink, or sub communities meeting at the local coffee shop,” he says. “So yes, we're selling coffee, but the magical thing about coffee is that it’s got this way of bringing people together. If I want to have a meaningful chat with you, even if I don't drink coffee, I'd say ‘Let's get a coffee’.”
The brothers were about 40 shops in when they opted to scale through a private equity deal. The roastery had become a full-time occupation for Petrus, and with the outside investment it’s grown into Blank Supplies, a separate entity that has capacity to roast for other national coffee chains and restaurant groups. Within a holding group called Slingshot, Stephan is building an entire eco-system of businesses that integrate horizontally with Platō: a bakery that supplies all the cafés, a company that sells coffee equipment, an interior architecture firm that designs all the stores, and of course Blank Supplies who delivers on coffee. This infrastructure feeds their consuming-facing brands, not limited to Platō.
As Platō further matures as a company, streamlining their operations to better serve their community, they’re still finding uses for that initial cowboy spirit. An imminent project is their first store opening in London, exporting their particular brand of South African warmth and friendliness. “I think that's actually one of our biggest differentiators at the moment,” Stephan says. When assessing the risk, he figured that if they fail they lose the value of one big store but if it sticks the potential could be tenfold. “I always say I'm just dumb enough to think something’s going to work,” he says smiling. His approach is to eschew the over-analyzing and just do it, then you’ll know if it works or not instead of wondering. With a 23 metre wide storefront, in central London, next to one of the city’s busiest train stations, Platō is certainly going in with a bang. “We're going big,” Stephan says with anticipation. “We were like, ‘Okay…let's take our shot.’
