Zeke's Coffee

I'm Chad Shusti with the Washington, D. C. Economic Partnership. And during our Neighborhood Week, we are highlighting D. C. 's mixed-use neighborhoods and the entrepreneurs who are making these neighborhoods unique. Today, we are along Rhode Island Avenue Northeast, near the neighborhoods of Woodridge, Brooklyn, and Langdon. As development continues to move east in D. C. , Rhode Island Avenue is now at the forefront of new business opportunities. To highlight the attributes of Rhode Island Avenue and the surrounding neighborhoods, we're going to talk with John Kepner, owner of D. C. Zeke's Coffee. We'll open this cast in a moment. Let's go talk with him. I'm John with Zeke's Coffee. We're a small batch coffee, roast, and tasting bar in Washington, D. C. We started in Baltimore in 2005 and began doing wholesale business applying specialty grocers, coffee shops in the D. C. area around 2008. So we decided to open up a second roast three down here because we roast everything in 10-pound batches, and our storefront serves as both a retail spot to pick up a pound of coffee or a place you can come in and taste anything that we roast. We chose Rhode Island Avenue because there are a lot of business opportunities here. There's good spaces, there's great architecture, and it's a real business corridor. Rhode Island Avenue is Route 1 right here, so we have both a lot of traffic coming into the city each morning, and it's also a major commercial strip for the surrounding neighborhoods. Probably the most important reason that we decided on this neighborhood over other commercial strips in the city was the active neighborhood organizations that invited us to the neighborhood in the first place. We met with us prior to ever signing a lease to give us background on the community and what neighbors were looking for, and then helped us with opening day, getting a big crowd out here to help folks become more familiar with the new work. The last reason that I think Rhode Island Avenue is great, especially here in Ward 5, is the support of our city councilperson. Councilman McPheffing's office has been very supportive. They reached out to us when we signed the lease, long before we ever opened our doors and offered their support waiting through the bureaucracy of opening a new business in Washington, D. C. It's to come in with a plan. We came in with a business model that we thought would work for our neighborhood and our customer base. I would say to reach out to neighborhood organizations because they know your potential customers possibly better than you do. They know who's going to walk into your shop if you have something that's dependent on foot traffic. And of course don't be afraid to reach out to your elected officials because especially here in Ward 5, they're very eager to bring new businesses into the district and they can be very helpful.