In 2011, Stuart Wilson left his career in banking, sold his house, and went travelling.
“I remember distinctly saying, I can’t do this anymore,” Wilson told Food Manufacture.
“I just don’t enjoy what I’m doing. I don’t see myself doing another 30 years of this commuting back and forth to the office.
“It’s [banking] a very stable, very comfortable profession to be in - so it probably wasn’t a sensible thing to leave - but I just had to do something different.”
Having wandered the world feeling not just like a sheep but a lost one, Wilson finally found his calling in Melbourne, Australia, where he fell in love with the region’s speciality coffee scene.
“It blew me away,” he explained, noting that at the time, there was nothing like this on the UK market.
“As soon as I experienced that, I was like: ‘this is what we need to do.’”
Equipped with a dream, he built Lost Sheep to make speciality, quality coffee truly accessible.
“That word is thrown around a lot in multiple industries - especially coffee. But, to me, putting coffee beans in a bag and selling them is not making it accessible.”
And so Lost Sheep began, starting its life as a tiny three-wheeled coffee van in the hope it could make great coffee in a familiar format.
Pitching up outside a Starbucks in a bold move to take on the corporates, day one of Lost Sheep wasn’t as impactful as Wilson had hoped, with the van making just £34.
And while the business has grown exponentially since then, it’s taken time for it to really find its footing on a bumpy road.
One of those bumps was Covid.
Covid came along and absolutely tore us apart.
Stuart Wilson, founder, Lost Sheep Coffee
With the hospitality sector wiped out overnight, Wilson’s business was devastated by the pandemic. He lost all the deals he had in the pipeline along with the shop, while his wife became very ill as a result of Covid.
“It was an awful time for a lot of people. But what it did was really make us re-evaluate...”
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