Today we’d like to introduce you to Heather Turner.
Hi Heather, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’ve known all my life I wanted to design houses when I grew up. I got into a great design program and graduated from Kendall College of Art and Design in 2005 – I packed up my car on a whim and headed for Colorado where I was hired for my dream job, designing big houses in ski resort towns. Then 2008 hit and with that, my ‘dream’ came crashing down. I ended up meeting my husband in the process though, and we decided to move back to Michigan where I bounced around in a sad, post recession, design market.
A good friend of ours owned a coffee shop in Kalamazoo and was no longer able to it; in 2013 my mom and I (who always wanted to run a little cafe) purchased Something’s Brewing (Kalamazoo’s original coffee house) together. We took it over like we take on anything else…full force and a little crazy. We switched all the pastries to everything made in house from scratch. We spent years redesigning the brand and the space until we had it exactly like we imagined….we finally had everything we worked for. We were successful. We had great employees that we considered family. I got married. I had 2 babies. Both of them were raised in that shop that they believed to be home. We were doing amazing.
2020 brought a storm we never knew could be possible. My mom and I come from a police/military family, and quite a bit of our business was local police officers. They’d hold their morning meetings in the shop, and were able to really connect to the citizens of Kalamazoo while hanging out for morning coffee. It really was a place that brought everyone together. For 6 years, we had hosted an annual Police Appreciation Day where we gave coffee and a cookie to any first responder for a penny. The day was always a huge success and always a lot of fun. Immediately after posting the upcoming 7th annual appreciation day, we were hit by the infamous cancel culture crew. My world came crashing down when overnight, our post went viral, reaching not only our entire country, but many others as well. We got absolutely DESTROYED by social media….thousands of 0 star reviews calling us “bootlickers”, racists, homophobes…the list goes on. Every phone call was someone threatening my life. Protestors waited outside our door….vandalized our building…left an ax by our door. The place where I was raising my babies, and creating a ‘family’ was no longer safe.
My mom told me to keep pushing…we don’t back down. My dad acted as the rock, who always reminded me to stay strong…but it was overwhelming. We were assigned a detective to work our case as the threats coming in were VIOLENT. Our local prosecutor, however, decided he couldn’t be bothered to pursue any charges against the offenders. Garrett Soldano ended up coming to our rescue, with the help of local law enforcement and a few local reporters to turn the negative actions into a stronger positive shift. Things were going to be fine. Then the riots came. Immediately after recovering, we were now boarding up our buildings and praying we didn’t lose everything we fought for.
After that dust settled……in came Covid. Little did we know when we closed our doors for 6 weeks of mandatory closure, that would wind up being the end of our dream. As you can imagine, our shop now attracted people who were very pro law enforcement. We opened our doors back up after 6 long weeks to immediately being inundated by the same people who were angered by our appreciation day, relentlessly reporting us to the state for ‘non-compliance’. The threats started again. This time it was raging, masked 20 somethings demanding to know my vax status and berating and reporting us for allowing a dying 85 year old man to sit and rest while he drank his coffee with the only people he had left to talk to anymore. The state threatened us with never ending cease and desist orders and fines. Again, we pushed on.
We came out of that mess, but with 90% of our customer base now working from home…the business never came back. Our sales were down 80% and the cost of our supplies was skyrocketing. The landlord still wanted his rent, and the bills never stopped. We kept pushing.
I came into work January 9, 2023. I put my kids back in their room to go back to sleep, and I got going on the day. My phone rang at 6:40 – it was my mom. This is where my world really stopped. Where everything I faced before seemed like childsplay.
“Your dad isn’t breathing”
I can still feel that pit, and my heart misses a beat when I type that. My police friends immediately came to the shop and sat with me, while I hyperventilated on the floor until they finally called CPR off at my parents house. My dad…my rock…the man I grew up to be EXACTLY like, was gone. I wanted to quit at that point. I was ready to throw in the towel. I was sick of pretending…sick of having to fake like everything was perfect and be nice to every person that would come into my shop, and later write a garbage review calling me all the names in the book. My dad would’ve hated that though. So again, we put our big girl pants on, and we went back to work. Our coffee shop family was nothing short of amazing. They were there for absolutely all of it.
I decided all that stress had taken a real toll on my body. I was gaining weight….miserable…tired. I finally called Mike Collier; a police officer and trainer in town I had heard alot about. I threw everything I had into his program. I lost a bunch of weight, gained a ton of muscle and turned myself physically, and mentally, completely around. The confidence was mind blowing and it set me up for so much to come.
Finally at the end of 2024 we couldn’t bleed anymore money. With another pit in our stomachs, we announced that Christmas 2024 would be the end of our 40 years downtown. 40 years. Kalamazoo fell apart. We locked the doors for the last time with tears in our eyes….replaying all the memories, the projects my dad so skillfully built, visions of my babies running up and down the cafe, and rolling out their own cookies. It was over.
Then out of nowhere, we were approached about a tiny little building coming available in my hometown of Vicksburg. 420 square feet of itty bitty little small town shop. We took the plunge and reopened in a true small town. A town that truly cherishes its local businesses. A town we LOVE.
I started having some issues in the spring of last year. Trying not to let the string of negative ‘ick’ that had been tailing us get to me, I tried to brush it off. But something in the back of my mind was nagging me. I couldn’t get anyone to take me seriously…’your bloodwork is perfect!’ ‘You’re in amazing shape…you’re healthy!’. Finally, I lied and told a doctor my dad had colon cancer (he didn’t), but it was the only reason they agreed to schedule me for a colonoscopy 5 years ahead of schedule. With a whole lot of anxiety, I went in for the appointment. When I woke up from the best nap of my life, expecting the surgeon to put my mind at ease, I heard the words “We found a mass. It isn’t good”. For the second time, I left my body, and watched the rest of this conversation happen from I don’t even know where. I have cancer.
A very spiritual, brilliant, and great friend of mine said to me “you need to figure out what the universe is trying to tell you and you can figure out how to fix it”. Thinking she was being absolutely absurd while I was sobbing on the other end, I hung up the phone and thought all night, coming up with nothing. The next morning it hit me like a brick. My entire life, I’ve had a paralyzing fear of cancer. It consumed me….anytime anything at all happened to me, my kids, my family, my mind went straight to cancer. And in my head, the word cancer was the end. So This was it…this was my chance to fix it. God took my biggest fear, put it right in my face, and said, ‘here. now beat it.’ I started hypnotherapy (I know, it sounded insane to me too, but it was a GAMECHANGER for my anxiety). I refined my diet. I worked out harder than ever……the rage that comes with a cancer diagnosis is POWERFUL. I had 8″ of intestine and 25 lymph nodes removed in the worst surgery I’d ever had. After 5 days in the hospital, my very stoic surgeon marched into my room with a smile on his face.
“Pathology came back. All 25 lymph nodes are clear. You are cancer free.” I cried like I hadn’t cried since I lost my dad….this time for absolutely blissful reasons. I know he was there in that moment, and I knew absolutely everything was going to be, not only ok…but beautiful. I followed up with oncology and lots of other scans and I’ve been cleared by all of them.
I know now that our story is so far from over. I know that we will face more challenges – but I also know that we will face so much success. Finally, now I know what’s really important.
The coffee shop has found it’s forever home in Vicksburg….I can’t imagine being anywhere else. We have found so much family we didn’t know we needed. Life is wild, but it’s damn good.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I clearly wrote too much in the first section ; ) haha.
No it absolutely has not been smooth.
Running a business is hard. Being a mom is hard. I’m also homeschooling my children – turns out, my daughter has a little rebel in her as well, and was kicked out of kindergarten for refusing to wear a mask. Running the shop actually makes this a little smoother – we teach them real world business skills while teaching traditional subjects.
Cancel Culture is vile. People will stop at absolutely nothing to destroy you, and they truly feel zero remorse. They gaslighted me into feeling like an awful person. But then I realized, the same person that was now leading this local section of the revolt was an employee. An employee who turned into family the second we bought the shop. She came to family dinners, holidays and parties. She was at my wedding…she was even at the hospital when my daughter was born. She happens to be gay. This woman who we considered family, now told the world we were homophobic racists.
Losing a parent too soon is honestly something I wish on no one. The pain is indescribable. The man who had been there for literally every moment was suddenly gone and I didn’t get to say goodbye. The first man I ever loved, and the one who I never had to be a day without…gone.
Having your own health threatened is terrifying. We take for granted so much. When I realized how much easier that surgery and recovery were BECAUSE of the shape I had gotten myself in, I was so grateful. When I was told I had cancer, I was immediately gutted, not for me, but for my babies. I knew what it was like to lose a parent and I couldn’t leave them.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We are Kalamazoo’s Original Coffee Shop, founded in 1984. We serve locally roasted, fresh coffee, lattes, and specialty drinks.
We also bake all our pastries in house, from scratch. Many of our recipes are old family recipes, and many are wild little concoctions we’ve come up with ourselves. We have such a following for our pastries, that sometimes I forget we are actually a coffee shop. We also cater!
We have closed the original Kalamazoo location, and now run out of Vicksburg, MI.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
There will always be challenges. You will always have moments you feel like you need to quit. Take a breath, and keep going. Getting to know our customers and making them feel like they are at home is what we owe our success to.
I also can’t stress enough…keep it simple. Know what it is you want to sell, or produce and do that to the best of your ability. When you get too big, too fast, you start to lose what matters. Sell the best product possible.
Pricing:
- Pastrties starting at 2.75
- Fresh Brewed Coffee starting at $2.50
- Specialty Lattes starting at $4.75
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sbcoffeekzoo
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sbcoffeekzoo
