People who visit and live in Bentonville typically love two things: bikes and coffee. Mark Bray recounts the epiphany on a flight home from Honduras that inspired the Airship Coffee we know and love today. After founding Airship in 2018, there are now four bustling locations throughout Bentonville – one of which is located at Coler Mountain Bike Preserve and only accessible by foot, bike, scooter, skateboard, or other wheels of choice. Listen as Mark explains the naming of the business, why he’s inspired to take part in the cycling community, and where the future of Airship is headed.
People who visit and live in Bentonville typically love two things: bikes and coffee. Mark Bray recounts the epiphany on a flight home from Honduras that inspired the Airship Coffee we know and love today. After founding Airship in 2018, there are now four bustling locations throughout Bentonville – one of which is located at Coler Mountain Bike Preserve and only accessible by foot, bike, scooter, skateboard, or other wheels of choice. Listen as Mark explains the naming of the business, why he’s inspired to take part in the cycling community, and where the future of Airship is headed.
Hello and welcome to Visit Bentonville's A New American Town podcast. I'm your host, Stevie, and today's episode is sponsored by Oztrails. Our guest is Mark Bray, founder and CEO of Airship Coffee. Welcome, Mark.
Speaker 2:Hi, stevie, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Of course. Thanks for being here with us. It's going to be a fun time talking about coffee. First, I want to talk about Airship Coffee's backstory. When and why was Airship created first?
Speaker 2:Well, the idea for a business was conceived on an airplane back in 2006 on the way back from a trip to Honduras. My background is agriculture. I was working with coffee growing communities in Honduras doing sustainable agricultural development work and realized that the communities I was working with were actually quite talented at growing, but their greatest challenge was access to the market. So I shifted my focus over to trying to build a supply chain out of some very remote faraway places, and that was the problem that I saw to work on. And yeah, so 2006 dreamed up a plan to start importing green coffee from Honduras and didn't really have necessarily a way to sell it just yet, but knew that we could improve the lives of these communities just by gaining some access to the US market. Yeah, so it started back in 2006 as an effort to create some market access for friends that we were working with down in Honduras.
Speaker 1:And what does the name Airship mean to you? Where did that come from?
Speaker 2:Well, you want the long version or the short version.
Speaker 1:Let's do the short one today.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's kind of a fun story. It started basically in 2006,. I told you that I was working on setting up an importing company, and then, 2008, it was time to import our first container green coffee and up until that point I'd been just smuggling green coffee and suitcases. And it was time to legitimize the business. And so I had decided to become an entrepreneur and create a business. And if you've ever been through that process, you know it's creative process and it's kind of nerve wracking. You've got to come up with an idea and it's got to mean something. And I'd spent a lot of time sort of obsessing about what I wanted to call the business and what the name was going to be, anyway, rewind. So that was around 2008, when I needed to legitimize the business. Rewind to like it was in June of 2000.
Speaker 2:I lived in Fayetteville. We were driving up Razorback Road, look out the window and it's just me, my wife Amber, my daughter Rainey, and she points out the window and she says de blimp, de blimp. And so she looks up and sees this blimp flying around Budwalton Arena and at the time we thought this is really cool. I can't believe she knows what that is. And so my wife bought this Christmas ornament to commemorate that little special moment, and so for eight years, at Christmas time, this Christmas ornament went onto the tree and then packed it back up and back into the attic and then back down every year and onto the tree. So anyway, here we are in 2008 trying to come up with a name.
Speaker 2:I had been on the internet way too long trying to figure out what I wanted to call this and it was time to do the tree trimming, the annual, you know, put the ornaments on the tree, christmas music play and cookies, milk, all the things right. And I'm still in there obsessing on the computer. My wife comes in there and she's actually holding that ornament in her hand and she's like, are you still trying to figure this thing out? I was like, yeah, I'm still doing it. And anyway, she said, well, what about this? And she was holding that ornament.
Speaker 2:And I said, well, I don't think the blimp is that good. And so she was like, no, but everyone knows what this is. Your own two-year-old daughter knew what this was, you know, and I thought he got a point there. That's pretty recognizable. It's iconic, you know. And so I went on and I started studying and researching airships, and there's just this rich history of the man's first flight and trying to, you know, get off the ground. And there was these pioneers of flight who were getting in these giant balloons that were attached to a basket and just kind of going up wherever the wind blows, you know, and sounds crazy when you put it like that.
Speaker 2:Sounds a little risky, doesn't it? And anyway, it was really resonated with me as far as, like some of the sort of pioneering supply chains that we were building out of the mountains of Honduras, we didn't know what we were doing. We were just sort of like working our way through a process, you know, and so I really appreciated that meaning that was behind it, and so I actually sent that to a friend of mine who was a really great marketing guy and I said, hey, this is what I'm thinking. And he fired back Yep, that's it, go with it. So that's how we got the name. It was actually created eight years before the business by a two year old girl.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess when you put in perspective. Yeah, so fast forward 15 years later, as if it's that easy at the snap of the finger. Now we have airship coffee, and how many locations do you have now?
Speaker 2:So we currently have four locations plus our Roastry here in Bentonville.
Speaker 1:So four locations here in Bentonville, and where are those at?
Speaker 2:So we have our original cafe that is at our Roastry over on Southeast Fifth Street, and we opened that in 2018. And we've been roasting there since about 2012. And there really wasn't a lot happening on that street at that time, but it was pretty quickly after that that, you know, the momentary came up, Meteor coffee showed up blue seafood restaurant. So all of a sudden we had this active, vibrant little commercial area.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, right down that little corridor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the timing ended up working out really well and, like I said, we've been roasting there for five or six years prior to that and people had been kind of knocking on the doors, coming up and trying to buy coffee, and so we decided, well, we might as well just make a tasting room type experience and we opened the doors and people came and they liked it.
Speaker 1:Amazing. And then you kept growing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, seems like when you do something, you put your heart into it. You do something well, people like it. More opportunities present themselves. And the next one came about kind of an odd time, because we opened Kohler. Airship at Kohler, right in the middle of the pandemic, was in November of 2020 when we opened. So that is up and running and doing fantastic.
Speaker 2:But that was a really kind of absurd proposition, to be honest with you. People were like you're opening a coffee shop in the woods, you can't drive to it, you have to walk or ride your bike. And we're like yep, that's what we're doing. So we've got Kohler and it's a little bit different vibe. It's, like I said, coffee shop in the woods, it's a little internet. It's a place to kind of unplug, chill out, read a book, have a coffee, hang out with friends, relax a little. So, yeah, that's Kohler. And we started our construction process pretty quickly after that on Airship at the Pump House and, along the way, threw in Airship at Ledger about the same time, just opened it in January of this year and then got a pump house open in May.
Speaker 1:I think all your locations are. They share one thing in common. Well, probably multiple things in common, but the one thing that I always feel when I go to one of the airship locations is just so peaceful.
Speaker 2:Oh, thanks yeah.
Speaker 1:Even if there are people or kids running around or dogs at the at the Kohler location, it's just peaceful and I have a secret, Mark.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't even drink coffee. That just represents an opportunity to me.
Speaker 1:That's. That's a fair point, but all my friends drink coffee and I ride at Kohler all the time, so we'll always stop at airship and all your locations are just cozy and peaceful.
Speaker 2:Well, even if you don't drink coffee, we have something else for you. That's right, yeah.
Speaker 1:Lots of teas and even cocktails and some snacks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely All those things.
Speaker 1:All right, so I feel like that's a good segue. Now I want to talk about airship and its involvement in cycling. What is your involvement in the cycling community? Like you mentioned, you have the location at Kohler. There's a pump track at the pump house location. What else you got?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, it's just always sort of been right there with us along the way. I don't think we we don't really think of it as like collaborating with bikes or being intentional from a marketing standpoint. It's just sort of woven into the DNA. It's if you start a business in this town, you need to be considering that, and it's just. You know, I guess one story I could tell that might give a little bit insights. Always, it was back in 2010, 2011.
Speaker 2:And my wife and I we live over by Thomas Jefferson Elementary, close to Park Springs Park, and I looked out the window and I saw a little track over there like build and trail, and we had, you know, always walked through those woods and gotten over to the park from there and enjoyed that. But we were like, hey, what's happening? We saw this guy and he's working on a back home. I went over there and talked to him. It's like, what are you doing? He's like, and he said I'm building trails. It was like trails. He's like, yeah, mountain bike trails. And it was. It was actually Woody who owns progressive trail design and, and so that was way back when I thought, oh, wow, that's really cool. We're going to have a trail right across the street, you know. And so, honestly, from then on it was just go, and there were trails going up everywhere.
Speaker 2:And, like I said, we started we were roasting coffee over on Fifth Street and the greenway runs right behind us and back then there just wasn't quite as much activity on the greenway, but we started seeing more and more people come to the park and lot on their bikes and make their way over to Fifth Street. And then, like I said, other businesses started popping up along Fifth and more people were using the greenway to access commercial services and so we were just like, wow, ok, this is a really strong connection to our location. And then we opened a friend of mine opened a bike maintenance shop out of the back of our Roastree and so that was his kind of membership based bike business and and that was servicing the community who was coming through that area and it just it just fit, it just worked really well. And then was baby, three years ago, had the opportunity to partner on a bike rack business, and so we currently house a bike rack business in our Roastree warehouse over on Fifth Street. We do local manufacturing for commercial bike racks and so that's, that's been a part of our experience as well.
Speaker 2:And then I mean Kohler is just like embedded in a 300-hectare mountain bike park and so that you know that's a very strong connection just to the community there. But really our thing and what we're doing is is trying to make a place where people feel welcome, and that includes anybody. That includes whether you're riding a bike or pushing a stroller or rollerblading through the neighborhood. It doesn't really matter. It just happens that it it makes a lot of sense to position yourself near trail, because our community is moving more and more towards using trail to get around.
Speaker 1:Active transportation is a growing in popularity here. Most definitely yeah.
Speaker 2:And Mark are you?
Speaker 1:a cyclist yourself. Do you like to ride bikes?
Speaker 2:I do, I really love it. Yeah, I've always appreciated, you know, just being able to get on a bike and go, but I loved riding a bike as a kid. I mean, I was really good at it as a kid, but I didn't have access to all the things we have access now. I grew up doing more conventional sports football, basketball, baseball, that kind of stuff and we would have to, like you know, make ramps out of the dirt pile at the construction site. You know, to have to jump our bikes on and things like that, and so it's just amazing. And so it's just amazing to live in this community where you've just got phenomenal trail everywhere you look.
Speaker 2:And so my wife and I made a decision early on that we really didn't want to travel around and go 100 different directions with our kids following different sports and different interests and activities, and we were searching for what's the one thing that we could do together as a family and our kids could take with them for a lifelong experience, and cycling is it. I mean, you know, it's something that you can be competitive and you can take it all the way to the professional level or you can just enjoy it. You can also use it as transportation. I mean it's just extremely versatile as a form of transportation, but also just like as a hobby and an interest. So it made a lot of sense and so we're all in. We started going to races and taking our kids to races and had that experience and go travel around the state, travel around the country, camp out, bike race, come back. It's just a lot of fun. It's a great way to spend time together.
Speaker 1:And in what ways has Airship Coffee supported the cycling and outdoor community? Do you ever do like event sponsorships or donate coffee or gift cards?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've done a lot of that. We sponsor athletes. We have, over the last five years, sponsored 10 or 12 different athletes who are racing at the pro level. We've sponsored a couple junior development teams. Like I said, it's a big part of what we do as a family, and so that makes a lot of sense for us to now use our business to help promote that.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:So yeah, and we get requests for donations all the time and we love to provide wherever we can. But back to what I said earlier it's our sort of inherent give back is making a place where people can come, use the space, have events that maybe support their organization or their cause, but also just collaborate, communicate, share ideas, and that's what coffee shops have always been really good at, and so that's what we want to focus on is being that kind of place where that can happen.
Speaker 1:Mark, what do you want cyclists who come to Bendville to visit to know about Airship Coffee?
Speaker 2:You know, I guess I just wanted to know that they're welcome and that we've built a place here for them.
Speaker 1:And do you have any big seasonal items right now?
Speaker 2:You know, our Baker Pat is making this chocolate croissant that seems to have people in quite the frenzy right now, so you might want to check that one out. It's at Airship at the Pump House Perfect, I will check that out next time I head up that way. That sounds delicious.
Speaker 1:What do you hope the future of Airship Coffee looks like?
Speaker 2:Well, our vision for the business is a sustainable business that's taken care of all the people that work in it and having a positive impact in our community. So it's really, you know, we don't have like this global domination sort of vision for our business. We really are quite satisfied with having success locally and making enough money to provide for the people that work in it. So we want to see our people thrive that work with us. We want people to feel secure that you know if their car needs new cars, they can be able to do that. We want people to feel secure that you know if their car needs new tires they have the money to buy that. And so really it's just simple improvements of lives and creating benefit. And you know, bentonville is just a wonderful place to live, and so our goal is to just make that more possible for hardworking, good people.
Speaker 1:That's beautiful, Mark. That was lovely. Where can people find you online? You have a website, social media.
Speaker 2:Yeah, airshipcoffeecom is our website and Instagram is our primary tool for sharing ideas and social media.
Speaker 1:And you guys just did some rebranding. Is that correct? Did I notice that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we did. We sure did. That's been a lot of fun and we have a lot more fun things in store that we'll be rolling out over the coming months.
Speaker 1:Okay, Easter egg. Okay, a little hint hint.
Speaker 2:Right, fantastic, need a reason to come back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Well, mark. Thank you so. So much for joining on today's episode of Visit Bentonville's A New American Town podcast, and thanks to you, our listeners, for tuning in. Be sure to follow Airship Coffee Oz Trails and Visit Bentonville on social media. We'll see you out on the trails with a cup of coffee.