How Two Indie Coffee Folks Made Austin Home
Mary and Andy from Armadillo Coffee Roasters sat down with me to spill the, uh, beans
In a city that’s increasingly (and fairly) criticized for becoming more corporate and less mom and pop at a dizzying pace, it’s always a pleasant aroma of fresh coffee beans to see folks take a bold leap to try and capture a cup or two of a given market.
Enter Mary Bozzelli and Andy Collmus, the couple (in both life and business) behind local coffee upstart, Armadillo Coffee Roasters. (Their website can be found here and they ship almost everywhere.)
I met them after they cold called me (!) to explore a partnership with my Evil MoPac product line (spoiler and full disclosure: it eventually came to fruition). So, naturally, I wanted to visit their modest but comfy and functional northeast Austin headquarters to meet both of them and put my eyes on their coffee enterprise. I really liked what I saw and was instantly taken with their uniquely American entrepreneurial story—leaving much more typical careers in the rear-view to pursue a passion project that neither of them saw coming just a few years ago.
Let’s get to know Mary and Andrew a bit better, shall we?
1. What are your backgrounds, including where you're from?
Mary: My background is in the art-side of things and a lot involving art education and darkroom photography. I got my Masters in Education when we were living in Colorado with a K-12 teaching license and I taught high school darkroom photography in a public school out in Virginia before we moved to Austin. I'm originally from the Maryland/D.C. area, but we've lived in a few different states when we were both going to college and getting our masters.
Andy: When I was 18, I moved from Pennsylvania to Florida because I wanted to be near the beach. This led me to a career in the service industry. I ended up moving to Vail as a bartender, which is where I met Mary. After a few years of that we moved to Fort Collins and I went to school for industrial psychology. We then moved to Virginia, where I continued research on technology in the workplace and game-based assessment. I had this idea that we could infer human characteristics from their game-play data, and we could use this data to find job candidates with non-traditional backgrounds. I worked in that field for a bit and eventually joined Facebook as a data scientist. It was a pretty sweet job, but I always knew deep down that corporate life just isn't for me. I'm so happy to be back in the service industry.
2. What brought y’all to Texas?
Both: One summer when we were still living in Virginia and Andy was working on his PhD he got an internship in Austin. We both fell in love with everything about Austin—the music, the food, the people. So when Andy was offered a job after his internship we were both ready to call Austin home!
Eventually I ordered some green beans and roasted them on my grill in a rotisserie basket—that was super fun and really opened the world of coffee because there are just so many varieties you can try if you order green beans and roast them.
—Andy Collmus
3. How did you get interested in coffee?
Andy: I was at a little league game when I had my first cup of coffee—probably too young but I made a double-play that game and will never forget it. I didn't really get into specialty coffee until grad school—my lab mates and I were drinking a lot of coffee, and it didn't taste good, so I started researching how to make better coffee. I ended up getting a more expensive coffee maker that had a thermal carafe instead of a burner. That helped a lot. Then we got into doing French press and pour overs. Eventually I ordered some green beans and roasted them on my grill in a rotisserie basket—that was super fun and really opened the world of coffee because there are just so many varieties you can try if you order green beans and roast them.
Mary: Starbucks got me hooked when I was a teen. My family subscribes to the Washington Post and there was a coupon in there for a free coffee every Wednesday all summer. I started to hang out there and met all the baristas. I kinda fell in love with the ritual and the being able to connect with friends and over coffee. We also always made coffee at home, but for a while it was just part of our routine. We started realizing how old a lot of the coffee we were getting from the grocery store was and how much better freshly roasted coffee was. We started ordering coffee online that was roasted to order and started picking out favorite origins and regions that we really loved. About 5 years ago Andy got me a little popcorn home roaster and we started ordering green beans and that really opened up a whole new world of coffee loving for us. Now we could experiment with fresh coffee from anywhere in the world and discover our favorites.
About 5 years ago Andy got me a little popcorn home roaster and we started ordering green beans and that really opened up a whole new world of coffee loving for us. Now we could experiment with fresh coffee from anywhere in the world and discover our favorites.
—Mary Bozzelli
4. Tell me how y’all made the leap to start Armadillo?
Both: Andy was taking a few months break from working to figure out "what's next?," and was roasting a lot of coffee on the small air machine at home. Mary said something like "hey, why don't you get a bigger roaster and try to sell it?" So we looked for a slightly bigger roaster and found one up north of Dallas. The guys who sold us our first sample roaster were so incredibly supportive and gave us some great tips on new places to source greens from for our current quantities. We started roasting out of our garage and dropping off samples at some local coffee shops. One of the shops said they loved our coffee and would feature it but wanted us to have a commercial license and we took that as a sign to move into a bigger space and really go all in. So we found the place on Daisy Drive, sourced a bigger roaster, and now here we are!
5. What is it like running an indie Austin coffee company?
Both: Awesome, stressful, scary, amazing. Each day brings new challenges and new wins. As a self-funded company, we run pretty lean. Any time something breaks or needs to be installed we have to just figure out how to do it ourselves, which is pretty gratifying but can be a lot to learn. Learning to roast good coffee is like 15% of the business, other times we are sampling and ordering green beans, working on design, packaging, and marketing; doing maintenance and cleaning; or trying to get the record player working in the shop.
6. What is the biggest challenge?
Both: Sales. Neither of us have a background in sales and it really is a different mindset. There's a lot of rejection, but you just need to push through it. Also, what we learned is that there really is no successful sales pitch like you see on TV and in movies. There's no instance where you just meet someone and close them with the slick words you say. For us, sales has been about relationships. We meet people, learn about their business, get them into the shop to try out coffees, and then they'll buy from us. It usually takes a few months, but it's pretty great to get to meet so many other small business owners in Austin and to help them achieve their vision.
7. "In five years, we'd like Armadillo Coffee Roasters to ___________________."
Andy: Have AC in the summer. What a dream. We'd also like to get a bigger space so we can have cool events and live music. We just want a cool space to hang out where you can see how coffee is roasted and taste some unique beans!
Mary: I really hope to be meeting a lot of women coffee producers from around the world and featuring their coffees. I'd also love to be teaching some educational sessions at our roastery! Hopefully this will be sooner than 5 years. I think pour overs can seem really intimidating but they really don't need to be!
8. What are your favorite things about Austin?
Both: We moved here because we loved the music scene, the night life, and Pinballz. Now that we have kids we love how kid-friendly this city is. And we have always loved the people. We meet great people all the time here, and that really speaks to how special this city is, even though we all complain about it. We're huge Austin FC fans too. We have season tickets and go to every game, unless we can't find a babysitter :(