Even though there have been restaurant closures and job losses this past year, some eateries are on the rise as they take to unique avenues like crowdfunding to get off the ground. Tucked away in the Cal Young neighborhood, a new coffee shop is on the way. Soko Coffee opens in June inside the Wesley United Methodist Church.
Owners and UO alumni Kevin and Leslie Yamaka originally planned to open Soko as a coffee cart that operated on weekends and at private events. However, when the pandemic was announced, their plans for the cart were fast tracked beyond anything they imagined. In just under a year, with the help and support of the Eugene community through Kickstarter, Soko Coffee upgraded from a humble cart to brick and mortar.
Opening the coffee cart “actually worked in our favor in that time, even though it was kind of a crazy time to start a business,” Kevin said. “We just got super lucky with the route we decided to go in with the cart.”
When the cart was finished being built in February 2020, Kevin was working finances for a restaurant. But, like many people at the beginning of the pandemic, he got laid off. Ten days later, the Yamakas’ first child, Emmy, was born. Leslie was, and still is, a full-time preschool teacher at O’Hara Catholic School; and, though it was risky, Kevin decided to push the coffee business “to the forefront.”
While looking for a location to regularly station at, Wesley UMC caught the couple’s eye because of the large parking lot, high visibility and easy access from Oakway Road.
Soko Coffee officially opened in June 2020. Kevin primarily ran the cart and Leslie, on summer vacation, often came in with Emmy, Soko’s mascot, in a stroller. The two would work while their daughter dozed off, and take her home once she woke up. The cart was conveniently just a few minutes walk away from home for them.
“All the way up until we opened the cart, we never felt like we had built roots in the community,” Kevin said. “But, just in the few months that we had the cart open, we felt like we met so many people that we lived close to and really got to connect with the community way more than we ever did before.”
Despite COVID-19-specific governmental restrictions that many restaurants struggled to operate under, Kevin said Soko was “pretty easy” to run since it was an outdoor cart. Maintaining social distance, wearing masks, not providing self-serve cream and sugar and taking extra sanitization measures were comparatively small changes in the cart’s overall operation.
After a few months, the Cal Young Collaborative, a recently formed nonprofit dedicated to supporting the Cal Young neighborhood organizations and community, approached the Yamakas with a golden opportunity: residing in the church’s proposed cafe space.
“That’s exactly what we were hoping to move toward eventually, but we thought it was going to be more like three or five years in the future,” Kevin said. “The fact that it came up just a few months after we started the cart was awesome, but also kind of crazy.”
The cart paused operations around Thanksgiving, when the Yamakas decided to officially plant Soko’s roots in the space. The cafe will operate in one of the church’s former libraries, which the Yamakas have been renovating since January.
To raise additional funds for equipment and renovations, they held a Kickstarter campaign to raise $40,000 in February, offering supporters exclusive items like bags of coffee grounds, Soko merchandise, personalized name plates installed in the cafe and private coffee classes.
The campaign ran for three weeks, which Kevin said was stressful since they were constantly checking to see how close they were to their goal. All Kickstarter donations are refunded if the fundraisers don’t meet their goal by the end of their organized campaign period. They ultimately raised $40,571, according to their Kickstarter page. In the weeks leading to Soko’s opening, the exclusive items that went along with their Kickstarter campaign will be sent out to donors.
“It was inspiring to get that feedback from our supporters,” Kevin said. “It showed us we’re on the right track and people are excited about what we’re doing, then also forces us to show our supporters our gratitude and really make this thing special.”
The fundraising campaign was a gauge of how much the community “believed in us,” Kevin said.
“I have a good feeling about this place,” Kevin said. “Wesley is my grandfather’s name, and since the name Soko is from my heritage, it feels really lucky.”
