The founder who challenged my thinking on entrepreneur-storytelling

For 16 years until it closed during Covid, I belonged to The Hospital Club, a private members club in Covent Garden. I loved everything about the club. Except the coffee wasn’t great! So I’d always start the day with an espresso at Monmouth Coffee just around the corner. 

In the 2000s and 2010s Monmouth was part of my London routine. In addition to frequenting their Covent Garden shop on Monmouth Street, when I wrote for the Financial Times I’d often meet my editor Ravi at the Monmouth outpost around the corner from the FT building.

One day in 2012 I was enjoying a coffee with my filmmaker friend John. We’d been talking about making a short documentary together. We agreed Monmouth would make a great subject for a film.

Monmouth pioneered speciality coffee in the UK. It was founded in 1978 by Anita Le Roy and Nicholas Saunders. As a storyteller I’d thought this would be a great story to tell.

So I emailed Anita to ask her if she’d consider us making the documentary. We weren’t making it as a commercial endeavour, rather a labour of love: a paean to a brand I loved very much.

Anita agreed to meet us. We had a lovely hour together, she’s great company.  But she explained she’d made the decision early on for her and her coffee shop to stay out of the limelight. She was adamant she didn’t want Monmouth to be the subject of a film.

At the time I was writing features on entrepreneurs for the Financial Times. My in-box was full of approaches from founders and their PR companies. Yet here was a founder of a business who didn’t want any publicity. Anita’s response flipped the whole idea of ‘entrepreneur as story’ on its head. I admired her resolve and her faith in her offering to speak for itself. 

This week, I was back again on Monmouth Street. The coffee scene in London has changed a lot in the last 20 years since I first came here, but Monmouth is still going strong, and there’s still a queue outside. Despite fierce competition it remains a London stalwart and is still loved. And all with never telling its own story.

In a world seemingly obsessed with visibility, Monmouth is a reminder that it’s not always necessary to push yourself into the spotlight. When you have a product people care about you can remain quiet and still build loyalty. Instead of broadcasting their own story, brands like Monmouth give the rest of us something worth talking about.

Thank you Anita for meeting us all those years ago and for serving the consistently good coffee ☕️