She Said No to Playing It Safe. And Changed How a Nation Drinks Its Coffee.
pic: https://champions-speakers.co.uk/speaker-agent/sahar-hashemi
She applied for 40 bank loans. Thirty-nine said no.
Britain was a nation of tea drinkers, the lenders said. Nobody wants to buy coffee in a cup and walk down the street with it. The concept made no sense. The market research didn’t support it. Move on.
The 40th bank said yes. And Sahar Hashemi went on to build Coffee Republic into 110 stores, a £50 million market cap, and one of the most recognized brands on the British high street. She did it before Starbucks had even arrived in the UK.
But here’s what the headline numbers don’t tell you. The real story of Sahar Hashemi begins not with a business plan, but with grief. And a decision to stop living someone else’s life.
The Life She Didn’t Choose
Sahar Hashemi was born in 1967 into a middle-class Iranian family. When the Iran-Iraq war disrupted her childhood in the early 1980s, her family emigrated to Britain and started over. Like many immigrant families, they placed enormous value in stability, qualifications, and respected professions.
Sahar followed that path faithfully. She earned a scholarship to the City of London School for Girls, studied law at the University of Bristol, and trained as a solicitor at Frere Cholmeley Bischoff, a 200-year-old law firm in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. She became exactly what was expected of her.
She was also deeply unhappy. And, she later admitted, not particularly good at it. She observed that those two things usually go together.
Five years into her law career, her father died.
Grief has a way of cutting through the noise. It strips away the performance of living and leaves only the raw question: Is this really what you want? For Sahar, the answer was no. She wasn’t living her own life. She was living the one that had been arranged for her.
She quit the firm. No new job. No safety net. No plan. Just the hard-won, painful clarity that only comes from loss.
A Cup of Coffee That Started Everything
Grieving and directionless, she flew to New York to visit her brother Bobby, an investment banker. There, she walked into an American-style coffee bar and fell in love.
This was 1994. In New York, specialty coffee culture was everywhere. Skinny lattes, takeaway cups, and the ritual of the coffee bar were simply part of daily life. When Sahar returned to London, she went looking for the same experience. It didn’t exist. Not anywhere.
If you wanted coffee in Britain, you sat in a sandwich shop and drank something forgettable from a plastic cup. There was no culture around it. No ritual. No identity.
She mentioned it to Bobby. He told her it sounded like a business.
That was the seed. Two siblings, a mother’s kitchen table, and a business plan written by people with zero food industry experience. Bobby left his investment banking job in New York. Sahar had already left the law. Together, they had no restaurant background, no hospitality knowledge, and no contacts in the supplier world.
What they had was the clarity that comes from having nothing left to lose.
Forty Banks. One Yes.
They needed £90,000 to open their first store. The response from Britain’s banking sector was near-unanimous: no. Thirty-nine rejections. Thirty-nine conversations that ended the same way. This is a tea-drinking country, the concept won’t work, find something else.
The 40th bank, a NatWest branch operating through the Small Business Loan Guarantee Scheme, said yes. Combined with a contribution from an angel investor, they had enough.
Coffee Republic opened its first store on South Molton Street in London in 1995.
It was, in Sahar’s own words, a disaster.
They needed £700 a day to break even. For six months, they averaged £200. Their mother came in daily and ordered espresso after espresso to keep the receipts moving. There was no supplier in Britain who knew how to make American-style takeaway cups. No bakery who knew what a muffin was supposed to taste like. They were not just building a business. They were building the infrastructure of an entirely new food culture in a country that hadn’t asked for one yet.
They kept going anyway.
The Revolution in a Cup
Slowly, the concept caught on. One customer at a time, Sahar and Bobby were converting a nation of tea drinkers. By 1998, they had seven stores and listed on London’s junior stock exchange. By 2000, they moved to the full London Stock Exchange. By 2001, Coffee Republic had 110 stores across the UK and a turnover of £30 million.
The media called it the “coffee revolution.” Coffee Republic was at the centre of it, doing what the experts had insisted couldn’t be done.
Sahar was named one of the Most Influential Women in Britain by multiple publications. She was awarded an OBE in the 2012 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to the UK economy and charity. She was recognised as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and named “Pioneer to the Life of the Nation” by HM The Queen.
Her book Anyone Can Do It, co-written with Bobby, became the second-highest-selling book on entrepreneurship in the UK after Richard Branson’s. Her follow-up, Start Up Forever, was named the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Month in March 2019.
In 2001, she and Bobby sold their shares and stepped away from Coffee Republic.
She later said it was one of her biggest regrets.
The Lesson She Wishes She Didn’t Have to Learn
Reading her own story in the Financial Times at an airport, Sahar cried. The people around her couldn’t understand what could possibly be sad in a business newspaper.
She has since said that walking away when they did was a mistake. Not because the exit was wrong, but because they left no mechanism to protect what they’d built. The culture. The spirit. The particular way of doing things that had made Coffee Republic different.
When the founders leave without staying connected to the vision, what made the company special often leaves with them. Coffee Republic went into administration in 2009 during the financial crisis. The brand was later revived under new ownership, but it was never quite the same.
The lesson Sahar draws from this is not never exit. It is this: if you have built something that works, protect its soul even when you are not running it day-to-day. Bring in people who understand why it exists, not just how it operates. Stay connected to the vision even from a distance. Don’t hand the keys to someone who didn’t build the house.
She Wasn’t Done
After Coffee Republic, Sahar launched Skinny Candy in 2005, a brand of sugar-free sweets that found its way into Harvey Nichols, Selfridges, Waitrose, and Topshop. She sold 50% to Glisten Plc in 2007.
She co-chaired the UK government’s Scale Up Taskforce, shaping policy for growing SMEs. She joined the board of the ScaleUp Institute. She became an advisory board member of Change Please, a social enterprise that trains and employs homeless people as baristas.
And then, in 2022, she launched what may be her most important project yet.
Building a Movement, Not Just a Brand
Buy Women Built (BWB) started as a single tweet during the pandemic. It is now a commercial movement with over 2,000 women-built businesses in its community, collectively generating more than £2.5 billion in turnover.
The premise is simple and quietly radical: consumers don’t realise how many of the brands they already love are built by women. BWB makes that visible. And it turns visibility into sales.
Under Sahar’s leadership, BWB launched the world’s first women-built “aisle” on Ocado. It has partnered with Whole Foods Market, QVC, Planet Organic, and TikTok Shop. It is changing not just how women-built businesses are seen, but how they are bought.
“Entrepreneurship suits women,” Sahar has said, “because it plays to a lot of the strengths that women naturally exhibit. Resourcefulness, problem-solving, networking. If the consumer economy had a sex, it would be female.”
She is not done yet. She never has been.
What Her Story Means for the Rest of Us
There are three things about Sahar Hashemi’s journey that deserve to stay with us.
Grief can be a compass. Her father’s death didn’t give her a business idea. It gave her the courage to admit she was living the wrong life. For many women, especially those raised to put family expectations first, the permission to say this is not for me never comes. Sahar found it in loss. She figured out what she needed to leave before she figured out where she was going.
The market doesn’t always know what it wants until you show it. Thirty-nine banks said no. The rational conclusion in 1994 was that Britain didn’t want coffee bars. Sahar’s instinct said otherwise. The difference between someone who sees an opportunity and someone who doesn’t is not information. It is the willingness to trust what you’ve seen with your own eyes, even when every expert in the room disagrees.
What you build is worth protecting. The part of her story that doesn’t make the highlight reel is the regret. She wishes she had stayed closer to the business she built, even after stepping back from daily operations. Culture is not self-sustaining. It needs someone who cares about why to stay in the room. This is wisdom that every woman building something needs to hear before she needs it, not after.
She Started with Nothing. That Was the Point.
Sahar Hashemi’s family fled a war. She became a lawyer she didn’t want to be. She quit with no plan, flew to New York, walked into a coffee bar, and saw something that didn’t exist back home. She raised money from forty banks and got thirty-nine rejections. Her mother drank espressos every day to keep the first store alive.
She turned a nation of tea drinkers into coffee lovers. And she did it before the world’s biggest coffee brand had even set foot on British soil.
Now she is turning the act of buying a product into an act of solidarity with women who build.
At SheSight, we believe Sahar Hashemi’s story is not a story about coffee. It is a story about what becomes possible when a woman stops performing the life she was given and starts building the one she actually wants.
The question she would ask you, and the one we are asking too, is this:
What is the idea you keep thinking about that doesn’t exist where you are yet?
Sahar Hashemi OBE is the co-founder of Coffee Republic and Buy Women Built, and the author of Anyone Can Do It and Start Up Forever. She is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and one of the UK’s most sought-after speakers on entrepreneurship and innovation.
Buy Women Built: buywomenbuilt.co.uk
Tags: Women Entrepreneurs | Founders | Coffee Republic | Buy Women Built | Resilience | Female Leadership | SheSight Spotlight
