Our Story
We are Solo
We are Alex Foss Sims (left) and Theo Garcia (right), and together we founded Solo.
We both met working as baristas. We got as nerdy as you can get about brewing, and after winning a national championship in coffee we decided to bottle our expertise. We started by flooding our parent’s kitchen, tweaking and perfecting the recipe until we were finally happy to release the finished product.
Speciality coffee is great. But it can get pretty complicated. For us, it felt that an outstanding cup of coffee is hard to come by. It’s easy enough to find a promising bag of coffee beans, but it then takes lots of skill to brew it to perfection, even at a good café the quality seems to be hit and miss. That’s when we decided to make it our mission to make great coffee more accessible.
The name comes from the Spanish “Café Solo”, directly translated as “just coffee” which is the name given to black coffee or espresso. We think there’s something powerful about doing one thing well. Simplifying, not complicating. We’re not interested in trying to do everything. We’ll focus on doing our one thing well, so our customers can focus on doing their one thing well.
Whilst we are hugely passionate about coffee itself, we feel our true love for coffee is found in its use and its effect. Coffee makes us focussed, dynamic and energetic. Characteristics that enable productivity and creativity. Modern coffee companies are notoriously non-inclusive. Lots of jargon. Lots of snobbery. Lots of facial hair. As a modern coffee company ourselves, we feel that it is our right to avoid talking varietals, altitudes and terroir. We don’t feel the need to celebrate just the coffee, we want to also celebrate what it allows us to do.