Offering more than just ‘A Place for Coffee’

Rich Palzewic

Staff

December 2, 2024

MARINETTE – Since opening in 2022, Jennifer Schiller, owner of A Place for Coffee in Marinette, said she has aimed to make her coffee shop a place for more than simply having a good cup of joe.

“It’s more than a place for coffee,” she laughed, paying homage to the shop’s name. “I want it to be much more than just sitting down and drinking a quality cup of coffee – I think it really is. People need a place to sit and get together.”

Not only can patrons order lattes, cappuccinos, drip coffee, chai tea lattes, loose-leaf tea and pre-packaged bakery items, they can also play various games – adding to the shop’s community feel.

“We have oversized playing and Uno cards,” she said. “There are also checkers and chess and newspapers to read. I also want to put in a bookshelf and have books in here so people can relax. There’s free Wi-Fi, so oftentimes, students come in and do their homework.”

Schiller said patrons are welcome to stay as long as they want – “I won’t kick you out.”

“I had someone come in here who stayed all day but only had one cup of coffee,” she said. “That’s fine – I don’t care. It’s supposed to be a comfortable place.”

The space, Schiller said, is also home to various community groups.

“We have Bible study groups that come in, and we have a knitters group that meets here every Saturday,” she said. “We also have a women’s club that meets here. That’s what I wanted – for it to be a community place.”

Additionally, Schiller said A Place for Coffee has curbside service through the Clover app.

“Clover is a point-of-sale system we use here at the coffee shop,” she said. “We do curbside from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. (on) Saturday – it’s great.”

To add its lineup, Schiller said the coffee shop also has regular live music.

“Every other Thursday, we have ‘Espresso Yourself,’” she said. “We also have people who read poetry, and my sister reads Harry Potter books. Everybody gets 15 minutes to themselves. It’s on a schedule because I want people to have their time. The local musicians who are regulars here are just amazing. I’m very impressed by our local talent.”

Having a son with special needs, Max, Schiller said she was inspired to hire adults with special needs.

“I hire adults with special needs through SAIL (Supporting Academics and Independent Living),” she said. “They have a job coach, and it’s wonderful. Max worked here for a little bit and had a job coach.”

SAIL is a program designed to provide special education services for students/adults who have been identified as needing an alternative, adapted and functional curriculum and daily living skills.

Pay-it-Forward Board

Piggybacking on its community feel, Schiller said A Place for Coffee has a program where patrons can “pay it forward” to future patrons who visit the coffee shop.

“We have a Pay-it-Forward Board,” she said. “I’m all about paying it forward because there are so many people who have been so wonderful to Max, especially with moving here (from California) – I was just so impressed with how people have really helped him out.”

The Pay-it-Forward Board, Schiller said, includes prepaid lattes, hot chocolates or drip coffees.

“It could be for a specific person if they’d like, but more times than not, it’s for a teacher, a fireman, a policeman or for someone in the customer service field… or even someone in the mental health industry or an organ donor,” she said. “We’ve had so many – it’s been wonderful.”

Though the Marinette/Menominee region is predominantly made up of Green Bay Packers fans, Schiller said recently, a Detroit Lions fan utilized the Pay-it-Forward Board.

“This couple came up from Detroit for the Packers/Lions game (on Nov. 3) and visited the area to sightsee a little bit,” she said. “They stopped at our coffee shop, and she had lost her wallet – I remember this whole story – so they really didn’t have a lot of money to buy a drink. I said to them, ‘Well, you’re in luck – you’re a Lions fan, and I got a free latte for you.’” 

Per a recent Facebook post made by A Place for Coffee, the Pay-it-Forward program – which began in November 2022 – has delivered 192 lattes, 20 drip coffees and 14 hot chocolates to patrons of the shop.

A 2,200-mile journey

Schiller said she was born and raised in California.

The story behind how she got from Los Angeles to Marinette and then started her own coffee shop, she said, has been filled with ups and downs.

Schiller said her husband is from the Marinette area, so even 30 years ago when he brought her to the city of 11,000 near the Michigan border to meet his family – “I fell in love with it here.”

“I thought it was beautiful, and I kept telling him, ‘We’re going to live there someday,’” she said.

About seven or eight years ago while still in California, Schiller said she was working for Netflix but then lost her job.

“Along with that, I was having trouble getting services for Max because he is autistic,” she said. “I told his dad, ‘I just don’t think he’s going to do well in California, so I really think we need to move, and I want to live in the house in Marinette.’ We had a vacation home here. He said, ‘Alright, let’s go.’”

That was the first step in the journey of opening A Place for Coffee, Schiller said.

“We moved here about seven years ago, and I had passed this former church (on Marinette Avenue) many times and thought, ‘What a cool place,’” she said. “It happened to be for sale, so I went to look at it.”

Because the church was “filled to the brim with antiques,” Schiller said she couldn’t see a vision for the property during her first visit.

“It was so filled with antiques and junk,” she said. “You couldn’t even see the windows because things were piled so high. I thought, ‘Oh, gosh, I see nothing in here. I don’t see a vision of something for here.’”

Schiller said her father was an entrepreneur and had his own businesses throughout her childhood.

“I have six brothers and sisters, and we all kind of have that entrepreneurial bug,” she said. “That’s why I was interested in the church to begin with – to see if something was there for me.”

About four years later, Schiller said the building was no longer on the active market.

“I called my realtor and said, ‘Hey, is that church still for sale?’” she said. “And she said, ‘I think the seller took it off the market, but it didn’t sell.’ She contacted him, and he arranged to have me come and look at it.”

Now that the former church was empty, Schiller said she saw its potential.

“I saw a coffee shop in here,” she said. “Coming from Los Angeles, there really wasn’t much opportunity (to open a coffee shop) because every kind of business was saturated. You couldn’t open up a coffee shop like this in California – it seems like a million of them already exist. It would be very competitive.”

In Marinette, Schiller said, things are “much different.”

“I took the pulse of town, and I went around looking for coffee shops,” she said. “The only one you could go in and sit down at was Starbucks.”

Also completely opposite was the pace of life from California to Marinette, Schiller said.

“Quite frankly, moving from California to Marinette was like putting my car in reverse as far as the speed,” she said. “Working at Netflix, I was commuting two hours each way, every day, with white-knuckle traffic, and I was only 30 miles from my house.”

Schiller said when she’d get to work “my shoulders were up into my ears.”

“I was so stressed out just from the traffic,” she said. “So coming to Marinette with my little two-minute commute from home to the coffee shop is a real treat.”

Schiller said she still works remotely in the music clearance industry while running A Place for Coffee.

“I have an office in the basement (of A Place for Coffee),” she said. “I still do the work I did in California for my 9-to-5 job. It’s nice to have that flexibility.”

From a church to a coffee shop

It’s that 9-to-5 job, Schiller said, that helped her open the coffee shop to begin with.

When she bought the former church, she said it wasn’t immediately ready for business.

“The inside of the building needed a lot of work,” she laughed. “After I purchased the building, I began setting aside one year’s worth of overhead costs – mortgage, utilities, etc. I set all that aside for one year, putting it in a separate bank account so I didn’t have to see it.”

From there, Schiller said she gave herself one year to complete all the tasks needed to open A Place for Coffee.

“I didn’t take out any kind of business loans for anything,” she said. “I just worked my funds off my 9-to-5 job. I’d finish one project and then raise money for the next project, and so forth until I had everything finished and opened up.”

Schiller said the coffee shop officially opened Oct. 4, 2022.

“There isn’t much (in the space) that was left untouched because I had to kind of rebuild it from the ground up,” she said. “It’s the original floors, but I had to have them re-sanded because they were just disgusting. The walls had to be replastered and painted. The electrical had to be rewired, and all the plumbing had to be brought upstairs because there was no plumbing up here.”

Schiller said she often gets comments and compliments from patrons about the uniqueness of a former church being converted into a coffee shop.

“As a matter of fact, I had a customer come in who said his grandmother got married when it was a church,” she said. “He gave me pictures – it’s fabulous – and I got approval to frame them and put them downstairs. In the basement, I have some before and after pictures. I wanted to put those wedding pictures down there because it’s pretty fascinating.”

Schiller said turning her dream into a reality wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Store Manager Kelsey Shruck.

“Kelsey has been a huge asset to A Place for Coffee,” she said. “I’m very thankful for her because she has taken over at times when I wasn’t able to be here.”

For more on A Place for Coffee, visit its Facebook page.