Our Story

We hope if you’re reading this section, you’re already a proud owner of your iglu. We’re extremely grateful to have you as a customer and whilst the following text is how we came to start iglu please know we’re far from egocentrics. We love knowing how businesses started and a lot of you do too, so we’ve popped together how iglu came to be.

We’re a family business based in Surrey UK and were originally founded on the principles of helping small independent cafes have access to reusable coffee cups. We started like many businesses do, by visiting and chatting too as many independent cafes as we possibly could. We met heaps of lovely people, some beautiful cafés, as well as trying lots of tasty coffee and muffins along the way. 

We’re huge fans of independent and often family run cafes and if it’s ever been on your bucket list to give your local a visit please do. So often they have such lovely stories to tell on how they got started and would love the opportunity to build a relationship with you too.

The topic of conversation for 2020 meant that we had to reinvent, diversify and market ourselves beyond face-to-face chats. Slightly daunting but very exciting… it was the beginning of an exciting journey. 

With coffee shops closed we took to learning as much as we could about selling online and launched as soon as we were ready to see if iglu was going to survive 2020. We still used our old school methods of dropping off leaflets with our daughter in tow and put on our bravest faces ready for launch. To our huge relief we sold out in 8 weeks. 

We definitely don’t want to paint it as a huge success story we still had an awful lot to learn (and still do) and we most definitely made a lot of mistakes but what was a success is we managed to take our personal approach online and were overwhelmed that even without the face to face aspect our customers turned out to be fantastic with great humour and feedback for us to make improvements. 

This proved to be the beginning of a new iglu with old school ethics still in tow.