Working as a coffee shop barista is a combination of short, intense customer rushes followed by longer quiet spells. For some employees, the whole process just increases the appeal.
“I love the pace of working at this store because every 50 minutes we just get crazy slammed, and there’ll be lines of cups down the bar,” said Christine Locker, an employee of Sisters’ Brew. “Everything will be a mess, and I’ll be covered in coffee and then it’s just dead. And then 50 minutes later it happens all over again.”
Sisters’ Brew first opened in Moscow eight years ago when the Rich family decided they wanted to spend more time with each other. Now, Sisters’ Brew has three locations on the University of Idaho campus: the Administration Building, the Janssen Engineering Building and the Campus Christian Center.
George Wood Jr. | Blot
“My dad used to work just, overnight sometimes, at a bank that he worked for, so my family was really sick of never seeing him,” said Ashley Rich, one of the two sisters for whom the company is named. “So my parents decided we should open a business together, and they just researched businesses for sale in Idaho, because we wanted to move here.”
Rich said her family was living in Texas when her parents attempted to buy an existing coffee shop in Sandpoint, Idaho. They decided to start their own shop in Moscow after the Sandpoint transaction failed. She said her mother, Gina Rich, spent weeks trying to name the shop and eventually settled on calling it Sisters’ Brew after her two daughters — Ashley and Dallas.
Eight years later, Rich said her parents have stepped back from the business and now leave decisions largely to the sisters and Brian Kelly, who is both Rich’s boyfriend and a manager for the company.
“I ended up getting involved after I started dating Ashley,” he said. “I ended up stepping in to take a role that was left vacant.”
Kelly and Rich met at Sisters’ Brew, where he had become a regular customer.
“He got blended drinks that had special whipped cream, that he had decided he liked, that I think my sister made for him first,” Rich said. “I just remember him always coming in, in his red lifeguard sweater and his baseball cap, and ordering his blended drinks.”
After it had operated in downtown Moscow for a few years, Sisters’ Brew opened its first on-campus location — in the Administration Building — at the invitation of Sodexo.
“They thought it might be neat to have a local company running a business on campus, so they contacted us and asked if we would be interested in running a location on campus,” Kelly said.
Rich said her family sold their downtown location in February 2013 because of the amount of time it took up.
“Having that downtown store kind of kept us separated because it had such long hours and it was open on weekends,” she said. “So it was never like the family could just leave for the weekend and take a little trip. It was like ‘no, sorry, I have to work.'”
There was a fourth shop in the basement of UI’s Law Building for a while, but it closed in spring of 2013 due to lack of business, Rich said. She said the school frequently offered free coffee in an adjacent conference room, leaving no need for a coffee shop.
Sisters’ Brew is still a family-run business, but the work is now spread among several employees. The biggest challenge in running three locations on campus is scheduling, according to Rich. She said the changing class schedule makes it difficult to determine how many employees are needed to run the shop, and where they will be needed.
“You can be super busy for 15 minutes and then you have nothing for another 45 minutes. So it’s hard to figure out when you actually need somebody, and it changes from semester to semester,” Rich said.
Kelly, who is most often in the JEB location, said the amount of traffic changes every semester, depending on which classes are held where.
“It is completely dependent on the classes,” he said. “So if they have a really high-volume 101 class in the auditorium right there, then that’ll be my busiest hour for that semester, but then next semester they may have a completely different class in there, so it just really depends.”
Although there are more employees now, Rich and Kelly still spend a lot of time working behind the counters. Rich spends most mornings at the Campus Christian Center and afternoons in JEB, while Kelly opens and closes the JEB location.
Rich said her favorite part of running the company is getting to know her regular customers, but it’s often a bittersweet goodbye when students graduate and move away.
“It’s nice to see the same people every day or every week, and just keep track of their lives for four or five years while they’re here,” she said.
According to Rich, the success of Sisters’ Brew is a combination of Moscow’s appreciation for locally owned businesses and employee attempts to create engaging shops that build relationships with customers.
“We just do a lot of fun things, like (Kelly’s) Bowtie Tuesday that he started so he can actually wear all of his bowties,” Rich said. “You get 25 percent off when you come in wearing a bowtie on Tuesday.”
Rich said she and Kelly intend to live in Seattle for a few years at some point in the future, at which point she is unsure who will run the company.
“It might be that we just have employees that decide they want to take over, like Christine at the Administration Building,” she said. “She’s just running that location right now. For all we know she’d like to run all of them, if we want to leave. Or maybe my sister will still be here and running it. It’s kind of up in the air right now.”