09/07/2026
We are so thankful to have Chris and Jennifer as our business neighbors!! They are awesome and Lula’s… well, if for some inexplicable reason you haven’t already tried it, now is your chance! I don’t know if a week has gone by in the past year that I haven’t placed at least one order there.
The veggie breakfast sandwich, spicy bacon avocado, cheese melt, chai tea (vanilla and spiced, hot or cold), and the strawberry smoothie are some of my family’s favorites there.
Lula's Coffee Co.
"We own a commercial cleaning business that we’ve had since 2008. We started it two years after we got married, and we were fortunate to take it full time in 2013. Jennifer was a bedside labor and delivery nurse until 2019.
We have an entrepreneurial mindset, and Jennifer told me a while back that she’d love to have a coffee shop one day, and I thought that would be fun, but I didn’t realize she’d been keeping notes on her phone about this dream.
We love traveling, so we take our camper a lot of places and the first thing we usually do in a new place is find a local coffee shop, usually one in a downtown. And so, we’d always visit one of these shops on every trip, and I had no idea she’d been keeping notes for years about what she liked and didn’t like about every coffee shop we went to.
--
I’d keep notes on how I’d implement things if we had a shop of our own, and it became kind of a mission or a bucket list thing. Our kids contributed, too, sharing what they really liked about a place, and would say ‘we should put that in our coffee shop,’ or ‘when we have a coffee shop, we should do this or that.’ And it became kind of like, a maybe one day when the kids are grown thing.
And then this opportunity kind of surprised us.
We told some close friends about it, and over lunch one day, we were talking about what businesses would be great to have downtown. Our friends own Jack’s Books a few doors down.
And in December 2024, my friend told me that the owner of Lula’s was considering making a life change and asked her if she knew anyone who might be interested.
When she told us about the opportunity, we started praying about it, and we had a lot of meetings with the previous owner, August, and just door after door opened and we took over the business in May 2025.
Our goal of having a coffee shop when we retired came a whole lot sooner, well, actually, two coffee shops.
--
It’s been really fun, because our kids were kind of dreaming about this with us and our dream was kind of in the future when they might not be in our house anymore by the time we actually got to start something on our own.
They’ve gotten to do this with us. They are 11, 13, and 15 and all three of them work here in some capacity. Our oldest can probably make coffee better than I can now. And the younger ones help clean, do dishes, and interact with people during our open mic nights at our Southside location. They love to come sit at the shops and ask what they can do. It’s become a family thing at a really great time. They get to be included in the family dream and they’re old enough to appreciate being involved.
It’s been really good for them. They’ve learned a lot of people skills.
Our staff is like our family, and by extension, our kids’ family. Our oldest son is working to buy a car, and having this role with our business is developing skills that hopefully all of our kids will take with them long after they move on from our home.
--
We’ve always loved retail. We met each other at the mall while we were both working in separate places.
It’s also been a great way to get a little more time with our kids, especially as they grow up and enter their teenage years. If they were working any other job, we couldn’t just come and see them and spend time with them. We don’t want to be helicopter parents.
But now that our oldest is working in our coffee shops, if we come up and we’re doing something, we still get to be with him.
--
We’re both born and raised Florentines. Chris has a background in marketing, and I was a labor and delivery nurse for ten years. But both of us always talk about how much we miss our mall days. I always say everyone should work retail or food service at some point in their life because they learn how to treat people and you get to interact with a lot of different people.
Although there’s definitely things we don’t miss, and we both enjoyed our adult jobs, but we missed talking to people and building relationships.
Here, we have our regulars, and through Lula’s we’ve gained more grandparents for our family, and a whole bunch of brothers and sisters. They’ve become an extension of our family. We’ve gotten to see people get engaged, we’ve watched people go through really hard things, and we have people that just come to tell us their life updates. We have this big extended family now that we wouldn’t have if we hadn’t gotten this opportunity.
The first day we took over, they came in and said, ‘we’ll do whatever you need, we want to support you, we’ll even water the plants, and if you get swamped, just put us at the front and we’ll help serve black coffee.’ And those amazing people come to one or the other of our locations every single day. And we adore them.
This is their place.
And if we’re really busy, they’ll just go to our other location. And that just fills us up. Everyone is so supportive. We’ve had friends bring their friends and family, our church community has been supportive.
--
We knew we’d get to talk to people and interact, but you don’t realize how important the coffee shop atmosphere is to the community. It’s almost like being a bartender in a way. Your regulars will come to you for advice, or share their good news with you, seek support for their bad news. We’ve had people we know that have come in fighting illness and if we don’t see them for a while, we call and check on them. That’s really been our favorite part of owning this business.
--
Downtown promotes community.
Period.
But a retail store you might go into once a month is very different than a coffee shop that you come to maybe five or six times a week. You’ve got regulars that are in here every single day, we’re surprised their names aren’t on the bar stools they sit at every morning. But it’s a great thing, and that’s where it makes the community part of downtown a bit more unique, because there’s not a whole lot of shops you can do that in. You might have great relationships with your customers, but you don’t see them as often as you do in a store like this.
--
People will find coffee. Whether they are buying it from a coffee shop or drinking it at home, they will find it. But they don’t come to coffee shops just because they want coffee. And there’s a reason they choose local coffee shops over chain ones. It’s because they want to interact with local people, and I don’t think you can emphasize that enough—having a place to go.
Some of our customers don’t have a big network outside of coming to see us, and they do that every day. There are people that run non-profits in the community that come here that have become friends and have brought us their challenges, things they deal with every day. And it gives us a unique perspective on other stuff going on in the community that we may not have heard about had we not gotten to know these people so well. We work closely with local non-profits, and we have our donations area.
--
The partnerships we’ve built with other stores and organizations like Jack’s Books and the Florence Little Theatre. Everyone gets excited about those, and it’s not just about a special drink or event that month. It’s about community. And whenever we partner with FLT, they invite us to go for opening night and to bring a group of our staff from our shops. It’s really cool. It’s a team building opportunity for us to get to go out and do something together. And the organizations we partner with get to see what we have been working hard to promote for them. It’s been a lot of fun.
--
And you get this sense of camaraderie with all of the other small businesses in the community because you aren’t doing this by yourself. We have unique sets of problems as small business owners that they understand, and you build these relationships. Everyone wants each other do to well. You want to be a place that people’s communities will want to support in addition to being a small family business.
--
Most of my early life, downtown wasn’t a place you’d want to come. Most of the businesses had left, and it was pretty much a ghost town down here. And so I remember years ago, I was working and part of the chamber, and they had the mayor of Greenville, SC come and share what Downtown Florence could look like. And I’ll be honest, I laughed. I said, ‘Downtown Greenville has a river running through it. That’s easy to make into a great downtown area. Florence doesn’t have that.’
So I was skeptical when local leaders started saying they were going to revitalize downtown, and I’ve had to eat my words. Downtown is a thriving place now, and I know there’s even more coming. But if you look at it compared to even twelve years ago, it’s completely different. It’s a place that people are coming to now, it’s impressive what has happened downtown, and it’s fun to be a part of.
--
Florence isn’t the beach or the mountains, but we’re close enough to all of those things that a lot of people don’t see the need to stay here and do things at home. They can just drive a few hours away to one of the bigger cities and do things. But now, we have so much to do, so there’s no need to leave town to experience great things. You can park your car, get out to shop, get coffee, visit the bookstore, check out a festival or parade, all in the same day.
There’s always something happening now.
--
I’ve met people who were visiting downtown while we were open for Florence After 5, and they stopped in and said they discovered downtown while they were on their way to Myrtle Beach from Georgia, and they made it a point to stop in this year during a downtown event, to experience our downtown before heading to the beach. It was impressive.
--
People who were traveling down I-95 put in “coffee” into their map app and exited and came downtown, found us, stayed for an hour talking to us, and then got back on the road. We probably won’t see them again, but it was great that they stopped in to see us when they could have gone to any other chain.
We want to be the place people want to come and hang out.
And I hope we’ve set the expectation that we’re not in competition with anybody either. Florence has a lot of really good local coffee shops that we frequented before we bought Lula’s. And there’s a reason we went to each one, and there’s something beneficial for everyone in each one.
We’re all different.
I really love that some of our employees have friends at other coffee shops and they’ll go sit at the bar and talk to them, and those friends come to our place and sit with us, too. I love when people from other coffee shops come and hang out with us, because I know they have so many choices and could view us as competition, but they still come see us.
We’re all part of one big Florence coffee family.
If you make people choose, they will choose. And they might not choose you. But if you don’t force people to choose, and you just present your unique take on the coffee experience, and let them experience that everywhere, they will give back to all of you."
- Chris and Jennifer Sawyer, owners of Lula's Coffee Co.
