In 1989, Brenna Worthen began working with Kent Bakke at his espresso machine business, which would eventually evolve into La Marzocco USA. After 35 years at La Marzocco and 46 years in the coffee industry, Brenna announced her retirement at the end of January. Over the years, Brenna has held almost every role you can at a fledgling company—bookkeeping, inventory, bench testing, purchasing, sales, unloading machines—and she soon settled into her role with customer relations and purchasing. We can’t overemphasize Brenna’s contributions to the success and excellence of La Marzocco USA, so we asked her to tell her story with the company in her own words.
“I started with Espresso Financial Services in 1989, whose name changed to Espresso Specialists in the early 1990s, Franke Coffee Systems from 2005-2009, and La Marzocco USA 2009 to the present.
My friend Heidi and I worked together at Starbucks Bellevue. She left to work as a technician for Visions Espresso Service and told me that Kent Bakke, who was sharing a building with Visions, could use some assistance at Espresso Financial Services, which was in start-up mode in 1989. I knew Kent from his time doing service work on the espresso machine at the Bellevue store. I talked to him, and he hired me.
Originally, Kent’s friends John Blackwell and Barbara Douma were giving Kent support in the background, but it was just me and Kent actively involved at first, so I did all the things you do at a start-up—bookkeeping, inventory, bench testing, purchasing, sales, unloading machines. Fortunately for us all, I never did technical espresso machine service work. As soon as he was able, Kent brought on more suitable people for most of those roles, including Joe Monaghan in sales. Pretty early on, I settled into customer relationship management and purchasing, which is my current role. I figured out pretty early on that my aptitude was for customer relations and purchasing/inventory management, and I enjoyed those roles. I am, by nature, a person who enjoys effective communication. I enjoy talking to the customers and I love, love, love interacting with our extremely talented and fun sales team. Every day is an exercise in strategy and problem-solving (or preventing problems in the first place), tact, and diplomacy.
Our first office was on Market Street in Ballard, and it was extremely basic, including the fact that it had no loading dock and the only door was a regular-sized front door. John Blackwell joined full-time shortly after that, and as soon as we could, we moved to a more suitable building for an import and distribution company down on Leary Way.
In the early 1990s, my day-to-day was a little bit of everything. As the company grew I played a sort of general manager role until we had enough staff that we could specialize in what we were good at. When La Marzocco USA started up in July 2009 after parting ways with Franke Coffee Systems, we were once again back to being a small crew in an unsuitable building. That lasted a few months, and then we moved to the building in Ballard, which we occupy today.
Over the years, the breadth and sophistication of the product line have increased incredibly since 1989. That said, the original Linea classic and its adoption by a major nationwide espresso chain in the 1990s propelled us to where La Marzocco is today by making espresso something that was known on a national basis.
The changes since La Marzocco USA started in 2009 have been remarkable but in keeping with our growth and increasing sophistication. We have expanded our geographical reach, our product line, and our marketing presence. We are more closely aligned than ever with La Marzocco Global. The development of La Marzocco Home has also been a great success, bringing La Marzocco espresso machines into thousands of homes over the years. It is pretty interesting to think back to the late 1980s, when espresso was an obscure beverage outside certain enclaves, to the espresso and specialty coffee landscape today. I remember Kent and I were in Italy in the early 1990s, explaining to an espresso machine manufacturer that Americans like to steam very big pitchers of milk. The Italians very politely and very skeptically asked why we would want to do that. Fast forward to the growth of specialty coffee over the last few decades and the popularity of the drive-through café.
I think the continuity I have brought to La Marzocco and our customer and vendor relationships over the years has been valuable to the company and the brand, and now I hand off some of those duties to Luke Steitz. Luke and I have worked together very closely since 2007, so we’ve been through the ups and downs of this business for a long time. Joe Monaghan had a phrase, “sense of urgency,” which I have always taken to mean attending to customer and vendor needs in a timely and thorough way, with a pleasant and friendly attitude. Luke shares that sense of urgency and is a creative strategist.
I really want to thank our customers for everything. I’ve learned so much from each customer, each vendor, and each colleague over the years.”
If you’d like to send a message to Brenna, wishing her the best in her retirement she can be reached at info.usa@lamarzocco.com.
