Black Sheep Coffee was founded in the Square Mile but has now expanded across the world. Its co-founder tells Felix Armstrong about his roots in the City

Gabriel Shohet is a company man. The Black Sheep Coffee founder enters the meeting room at the coffee chain’s Southwark offices clad in a branded hoodie, with a Black Sheep takeaway cup and waffle in hand, and marvels at the latte art on the coffee I am handed by his employee: “You should take a photo of that for the article!”

But Shohet quickly becomes more reflective when asked to explain the beginnings of his coffee shop empire: “It was tough, man. We didn’t have any money.”

Shohet founded Black Sheep Coffee in 2013 along with Eirik Holth, who was his flatmate at the University of St Andrews. The pair scraped together £23,000 on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, and launched their range of Robusta coffee, before setting up at high streets and roundabouts in London with rented coffee machines. 

“We would just rock up with an espresso machine on rental and a trestle table and pumps and stuff and wastewater tanks and just make coffee out on the street for folks,” Shohet explains.

We’ve been very lucky that we don’t have any private equity involvement

The pair rotated through Brick Lane market, Camden market, Leather Lane market and Old Street Roundabout for two years, before opening their first coffee shop at Aldgate Tower in the Square Mile.  

Black Sheep set for UK expansion

Shohet and Holth built Black Sheep’s first location by hand, using YouTube tutorials to install the plumbing and lining the walls with scrap iron sheets. “We had pallets that we would pick up in construction sites and we would just take all the rusty nails off with crowbars and then we would build our furniture, our front counters, we would build our main signage with those pallets,” Shohet recalls.

Black Sheep coffee shops – whether in Dubai, Scotland or Texas – each bear the exposed metal and messy graffiti inspired by this original location, he explains as he swipes through photos of him and his university flatmate building the first shop.

While Black Sheep is now expanding in the US and the United Arab Emirates, the coffee chain last year announced plans to double its London footprint with 60 new stores, including 10 in the centre of the capital. 

The Square Mile, where the coffee chain started, is at the heart of Shohet’s business, he explains. “I think the City of London is a magical place. There’s something about it.”

But the coffee firm is expanding across the country, including on regional high streets – where longstanding competitors like Costa Coffee and Starbucks are struggling amid falling footfall and wavering consumer confidence. 

We want to rid the world of boring coffee

But Shohet is not put off, he says. “Man, I don’t see it, honestly. If the incumbents are struggling, I don’t know. All I know is our numbers, and our numbers are telling us that the UK is doing fantastic.”

Shohet reflects on the external shocks that have emerged since Black Sheep was founded: “It is true that life threw a few curveballs at us since we started the business: Brexit, pandemic, railway strikes, inflation, recession, you name it. 

“But here we are today, growing faster than ever; growing faster than any of our peers, still making tweaks, still scrapping old ideas and implementing new ones, still iterating.”

More than Gen-Z?

Blank Street Coffee, a US coffee chain specialising in viral caffeinated drink matcha, has expanded at a similar pace in London to Black Sheep, in large part due to a focus on capturing a Gen-Z audience through social media trends and celebrity partnerships.

But Shohet is determined not to identify a particular target customer for his coffee chain. “I’m very, very hesitant to start defining the demographic of our customer base. I find it a bit alienating,” he admits. 

“When we were first starting in the City of London, our demographic was people wearing suits, but that had nothing to do with Black Sheep. Then you start opening in Guildford and Reading and then you’re going to have moms with strollers,” he continues.

“And then you open on Oxford Street and you’re going to have lots of tourists. And guess what? If you open in an airport, it’s going to be a bunch of travelers – like, no shit.”

What does success look like for Black Sheep? “You know, we’ve been very lucky that we don’t have any private equity or venture capital funds in our cap table,” Shohet says, “so we don’t have targets that are arbitrarily set by anybody.

“We just want to grow, we want to stay true to our mission, which is to rid the world of boring, average-tasting coffee.”