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Synopsis
Howard Schultz is CEO and chairman of Starbucks, the highly successful coffee company. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 19, 1953, Schultz graduated from Northern Michigan University with a bachelor’s degree in communications before becoming director of retail operations and marketing for the Starbucks Coffee Company in 1982. After founding the coffee company Il Giornale in 1987, he purchased Starbucks and became CEO and chairman of the company. In 2000, Schultz was resigning as Starbucks’s CEO. Eight years later, however, he returned to head the company. In 2014, Starbucks had more than 21,000 stores worldwide and a market cap of $60 billion.
Early Life and Career
Schultz currently resides in Seattle, Washington, with his wife, Sheri (Kersch) Schultz, and two children,Jordan and Addison. Schultz moved with his family to the Bayview Housing projects in Canarsie, a neighborhood in southeastern Brooklyn, when he was 3 years old. Schultz was a natural athlete of basketball and football at school. He made his escape from Canarsie with a football scholarship to
Northern Michigan University in 1970.
After graduating from the university with a Bachelor of Science degree in communication in 1975, Schultz found work as an appliance salesman for Hammarplast, a company that sold European coffee makers in the United States. In the early 1980s, Schultz was selling more coffee makers to a small operation in Seattle, Washington, known then as the Starbucks Coffee Tea and Spice Company, than to Macy’s.
Birth of the Modern Starbucks
A year after meeting with Starbucks’ founders, in 1982, Schultz was hired as director of retail operations and marketing for the growing coffee company, which, at the time, only sold coffee beans.
Early on, Schultz set about making his mark on the company while making Starbucks’ mission his own. In 1983, while traveling in Milan, Italy, he was struck by the number of coffee bars he encountered. An idea then occurred to him: Starbucks should sell not just coffee beans but coffee drinks. Schultz’s enthusiasm for opening coffee bars in Starbucks stores, however, wasn’t shared by the company’s creators. Nevertheless, Schultz was persistent until, finally, the owners let him establish a coffee bar in a new store that was opening in Seattle. It was an instant success, bringing in hundreds of people per day and introducing a whole new language—the language of the coffeehouse—to Seattle in 1984.
But the success of the coffee bar demonstrated to the original founders that they didn’t want to go in the direction Schultz wanted to take them. Disappointed, Schultz left Starbucks in 1985 to open a coffee bar chain of his own, Il Giornale, which quickly garnered success.
Two years later, with the help of investors, Schultz purchased Starbucks, merging Il Giornale with the
Seattle company. Subsequently, he became CEO and chairman of Starbucks. He had to convince investors that Americans would actually shell out high prices for a beverage that they were used to getting for 50 cents. In 2000, he was resigning as Starbucks’ CEO. Eight years later, however, he returned to head the company.
Continued Success
In 2006, Schultz was ranked No. 359 on Forbes magazine’s “Forbes 400” list, which presents the 400 richest individuals in the United States. In 2013, he was ranked No. 311 on the same list, as well as No. 931 on Forbes’s list of billionaires around the globe.
Today, no one company sells more coffee drinks to more people in more places than Starbucks. By 2012,
Starbucks had grown to encompass more than 17,600 stores in 39 countries around the world, and its
market capitalization was valued at $35.6 billion. By 2014, Starbucks had more than 21,000 stores
worldwide and a market cap of $60 billion. The incredibly popular coffee company reportedly opens two
or three new stores every day and attracts around 60 million customers per week.
Source : https://www.biography.com/people/howard-schultz-21166227 |
