Bitty and Beau's Coffee isn't your average coffee shop. It's a "human rights movement" in disguise, say co-founders Amy and Ben Wright.
The husband-and-wife duo left their careers in education and finance — in 2016 and 2020, respectively — to build Bitty and Beau's, a chain of coffee shops run almost entirely by people with intellectual or developmental disabilities. The chain is named after two of their four children, both of whom were diagnosed with Down syndrome.
The idea, which hit Amy "in the shower one day," is based on a simple concept, she tells CNBC Make It: "Coffee shops could be the perfect place to not only create jobs for people with disabilities, but a place where others could come in and spend time with people with disabilities and hopefully start to see them a little bit differently."
Today, Bitty and Beau's has 19 locations and more than 400 employees across 11 states, according to its website. The Wrights declined to share financial data, but noted that the company is profitable.
It started when Amy left the after-school theater program for kids she'd founded, to help the first Bitty and Beau's get off the ground. It was a 500-square-foot location employing 19 people with disabilities in her hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina.
Within six months, the shop moved into a 5,000-square-foot space, Ben says. In May 2020, he left Dye Creek Capital — a financial advisement firm he founded in 2013, after serving as a VP of investments at Morgan Stanley and Citi — to join Amy full-time.
"We were
busting at the seams from Day 1," says Ben, who adds that social media
helped raise customer awareness: "People were making trips from across
the country to come see what we were doing here."
The work has come with recognition: In 2017, Amy won CNN's "Hero of the Year" award, which included a $10,000 prize and $100,000 grant for her nonprofit, Able to Work USA.
Still, the Wrights' advocacy has barely dented a much larger nationwide problem, they say: About 42.5 million Americans live with disabilities, according to 2021 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. That includes people with hearing, vision, cognitive, ambulatory, self-care and independent living difficulties.
Only 21.3% of people with disabilities were employed last year, and the unemployment rate for those with disabilities was about twice as high as the rate of those without, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in February.
Many employers are biased — even unconsciously — against workers with disabilities, as CNBC Make It reported last week. Yet companies whose workforces include people with disabilities have 30% higher profit margins and 28% higher revenues than those that don't, according to a 2018 report by consulting firm Accenture.
The Wrights hope that Bitty and Beau's success so far could inspire other corporate leaders to hire more people with disabilities, they say.
"We just think the biggest part of the coffee shop is not just serving a great cup of coffee, but it's giving people the opportunity to see people with disabilities doing jobs that people without disabilities could see themselves doing," Ben says. "And for [people without disabilities] to stop looking at them as non-human beings, accidents or mistakes, or view them with overwhelming sympathy."
"Disabled people don't need sympathy and charity," he adds. "They need opportunities. They need a shot at prosperity and being part of the economic fabric of this country."