Café Barcomi’s Success Story

Café Barcomi is the biggest café in Germany, it all began when Cynthia Barcomi then a professional dancer wanted to open her own business and make a living. Cynthia Barcomi was from Seattle, Washington, USA. Came to Germany after graduating from Columbian university in 1985 moved to Germany to teach dance.

Barcomi started her small business selling brownies, muffins, bagels and roasted Coffee. Back in 1997 starting her business with her small savings of $15000 and a bank loan of $100,000. For Barcomi getting this $100,000 was not so easy as she was not a German and lot dint even care for her idea of opening the business. Back then she had to learn baking all of her own as there was no Google to says “ I remember me going to library to find the dealer for coffee vending machine”. She had learnt a lot of the blending recipes in the library and to get the loan she had to do a lot of hard work she had gone for more than 20 banks asking for loan and she been rejected in all the banks and finally after 2 months of intense hard work of finding for loan she was given a loan in a bank to start her business. After getting her loan she began her business with a big opening but later business began to fall and then she realized that she had to come up with a way to get people. As she came to know that Germans loved coffee and cake very much she promoted coffee and cake on Sundays. Later she had really made lots of effort in decorating the café as she came to know that people began to love her café. Later in 1997 she came up with another café in Mitte district a bit larger than the previous one.

Barcomi says “one of my biggest blender was when I had hired two experienced French pastry chefs. I thoughts that they would be great for my kitchen but they were disrespectful for me since I had not much experienced as they did and I had made a lot of progress in café business. Those two had sued me and I sued them back. But however at the end I won the case.”

There were lots of ups and downs in her business and some of her experience was really challenging and even awful. Since she was also from a different culture she had to listen to a lot of people giving her a damn. But she kept on with her entrepreneurship thinking and hence she had a success in her business.

Her current estimate $2.07 million. And she is also known by the name “The coffee queen of Berlin”.