Brian Maynard of St. Joe has taken to telling folks “I’m either brilliant or stupid, and we’ll need about another year or so to determine which of those two things is accurate.” The entrepreneurial businessman, who spent a career with Whirlpool Corporation before venturing into the boutique coffee business that he knows and loves, makes that comment regarding his decision to add a third coffee shop to his stable in less than three years with the potential for more to come in the future.
Maynard will launch Forte Coffee Company’s third location this coming spring in the heart of downtown St. Joseph at the intersection of State and Pleasant Streets at the site of the former Advanced Family Eyecare retail shop which moved out last fall.
Maynard says, “I have said to several people regarding the decision for Benton Harbor and now for downtown St. Joe that I do believe the economy in Southwest Michigan continues to grow and I have confidence in it. I have confidence in the Arts District where we’re located in Benton Harbor and clearly, downtown St. Joe with a vibrant tourist economy is very strong.”
Maynard and his business partner, his wife Barbara, started Forte Coffee two years ago, opening their inaugural location on Niles Avenue in the Southtown neighborhood on January 14, 2019. He says, “We really started about three years ago doing research and I always believed that there was an opportunity for multiple locations in the St. Joe-Benton Harbor area and I don’t know where the end is, but I think if we continue to establish ourselves well here we may very well venture out to even other areas, but I don’t know where that might be.”
Maynard opened up Forte Coffee number two in the Benton Harbor Arts District on Water Street back on September 11th of 2020. He says, “We started looking at the space in Benton Harbor in January, and then I signed the lease about the first week of March just before the first state mandated shutdown order and we quickly came to an agreement with the landlord and ended up opening in September.”
Then, a couple of months ago, Maynard happened to be driving through downtown St. Joe and noticed the folks at the optical shop were taking the sign down from the building. His excitement at that point was palpable as he admits, “I had looked at spaces in downtown St. Joe for some time, but just hadn’t found the right setup for what we need. Sometimes they were too big, sometimes not in the right spot, but that corner of State and Pleasant is very, very visible. So, I popped into the neighboring business at Perennial Accents and talked to Kelly the owner there and she connected me with the landlord and we had some conversations about the space and crunched the numbers, did the gut check and made the decision to expand again.”
That was about a month ago, and in recent days Maynard has used his social media to conduct a teaser campaign intimating at something new in the wind for the Forte business. He has launched the remodeling project at 222 State Street and says the “Opening Soon” sign will soon be erected in the city’s central business district with plans to open in the spring.
Maynard notes, “While the space is highly visible, it’s also very small and will end up being the smallest of our three locations, but that works for us. We will continue to roast all of our own coffee at the Niles Road location and send it out to both Water Street, and then now to the State Street location.” Additionally, he says, “We have grown our online business with bagged coffee and our wholesale business is doing a little better, but last year was tough in that realm.”
Forte Coffee also craftss all of their own baked goods from scratch with “real butter, real vanilla and real love.” Brian says, “My wife Barbara does all of the baking and we bring those things to eat to each of the locations.” He adds, “We plan to serve other food in St. Joe as we do at the other two locations, including sandwiches and salads that we prepare at Niles Road and then deliver to both locations, for ‘grab-and-go’ options, but we don’t do anything made specifically to order.”
Maynard’s expertise in the world of coffee continues to grow, and he’ll be the first to tell you that, “There are other restaurants in the area, of course that serve coffee but most all of them are restaurants featuring food first but have coffee. For Forte Coffee, we are always coffee first and we have food items that will complement the coffee.”
Seating in St. Joe will be very limited due to the smaller space, with Brian saying, “I haven’t done the math exactly for the square footage, but I suspect we’ll only have 20 or so seats.”
He likes the new line up of his three sites, noting, “We are three and a half miles between the three locations. Niles Road to Water Street in Benton Harbor is 3.5 miles. So we’re almost exactly in between with downtown St. Joe, but what’s interesting is that in all three locations I feel like there’s a micro economy for each of those.” By way of explanation he says, “At the Niles Road location we’re trying to leverage our investment by sending coffee to other places. That site is mostly ‘to go’ as people are on their way to work or on their way home or running errands and we’re easy to get in and out of. Water Street in Benton Harbor is an area that we’re going to continue to grow as the Arts District grows. It’s been tough in the winter. But in the summer, or what little bit of it that we had in September, business was pretty good. So we have confidence in the area and Benton Harbor. Downtown St. Joe is, everyone knows, lots of tourists and there are approximately 100 days between Memorial Day and Labor Day and you can pretty much add another 30 days on each end of that. So you’ve got about 130 days a year where you have a lot of tourists. Plus its busy for around 60 days around the holidays. So combined you’ve got a 190 days of pretty good traffic down there.”
Because winter isn’t quite as robust, Forte Coffee in St. Joe will have shorter hours in the winter and expand in the summer. Brian says, “While there are a number of businesses down there that just open in the summer and close in the winter because they do enough business throughout the summer months to be able to cover their rent for the year, we are a year-round business.”
Maynard concludes, “Coffee is a business built around habits, and we want to be on people’s routine. We want them to know that they’re going to be able to get their cup of coffee whenever they want.”
