Richard Schramm has always been a dreamer. Hailing from an IT consulting background when living in Melbourne nearly two decades ago, his wife Melissa was keen to move back to Tasmania and it set the wheels in motion to start up a hospitality business. In what shape or form the couple wasn’t too sure – a coffee cart idea was initially floated – and a chance meeting in Melbourne with a café owner led Schramm down the specialty coffee path. When the couple then stumbled across an available space in Criterion Street it became the beginning of a journey which has now found a permanent home in Moonah. “I was the guy working in IT with a folder on my computer called ‘My Business Ideas’. At that stage I was more passionate about being entrepreneurial rather than specifically looking to open a specialty coffee business, that wasn’t the agenda to begin with,” Schramm says. “Early on, it was even things I’d seen work overseas, like crepe shops or anything that seemed like a viable business model, where you could potentially even scale them, franchise them. That was all my early business thinking around it. “Then in my research, I’d signed up to a barista basics course over in Melbourne. When I gave the lady my address on signing up, she said, ‘you’re just down the road from this amazing, progressive specialty coffee café, have you been there?’ I hadn’t even heard of it, so I went there to check it out. My brother came with me, to have a planning chat over coffee about this move to Tassie. We walked in and the owner of this cafe, Andrew, knew my brother because he used to go to Andrew’s previous cafe in the city. Straightaway Andrew took me under his wing. He was just a really generous guy with his knowledge and time and I ended up getting a
weekend job there, learning coffee, chatting to him in the evenings, talking equipment.
“It was just one of those sort of chance moments - I’m a firm believer that you make your own luck and you create these opportunities - if I hadn’t gone there that day to do my research, that never would have happened. It was one of those moments where it really changed my path and he opened my eyes a lot to specialty coffee and what it was about. “Melissa and I didn’t have firm plans of exactly what it [the business model in Tasmania] would be, but it evolved fairly quickly into this idea of coffee carts located in office foyers. We’d seen this model working well in Melbourne and thought something like that could be a go in Hobart. We started formulating some business plans and investigating that business model, we did a fair bit of research into it, but we took the plunge and moved down here without a firm plan of what we were going to do. “Originally I’d reached out to a few buildings to try and get a cart going in the foyer, retrospectively it was probably good it didn’t work out because I don’t think there’s enough critical mass of people in Hobart’s buildings to really justify it, at least not 15 years ago. Then suddenly this space came up in the city, we just jumped on it and all of a sudden it was very real.” Schramm started Villino with just Melissa and his mother-in-law, slowly building business and gaining a solid reputation. After a couple of years he decided to expand into roasting. This was done initially to provide more control over product quality and supply – little did he know how quickly it would grow as the coffee scene in the state really took off. What started as a day a week by himself roasting in a warehouse
9 Tasmanian Hospitality Review April/May Edition
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