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"I assume as soon as you are really into a topic, such as filter coffee, and you start to develop your own ideas and philosophies, it starts to be very, very difficult to find a job, where you will find exactly this," she says. "I had this in both areas—in design and also in coffee. After earning my diploma at university, I got a job in a design office. First it was very exciting, but then I was thinking—do I really like this? And I realized that no, I didn't, not in a way I could imagine continuing for the next 10 years. And coffee? It was the same! The idea of being employed in a coffee place where you can't stand behind the philosophy 100 percent didn't work for me anymore. Sure, it is more comfortable and easy to be employed by someone else, but it is even nicer to challenge oneself and to realize ideas on your own." Though she doesn't recall the exact moment and setting when she and Björn met, she knows they shared a sense of wanting to create something that thus far hadn't existed in Berlin. "For both of us, it was clear quite fast that if we didn't open our own coffee business soon, we probably wouldn't continue to work with coffee anymore. Though we are totally different, we complement each other operatively very well. And then it is always very nice to have different points of views on things to create the most out of it." Nora and Björn were adamant about using their own money for Chapter One—they didn't want investors, or as they saw it, other cooks in the kitchen. She says that every decision they made and continue to make about the business comes from intuition. "We didn't even have a business plan. We just followed our intuition and idea about creating a new coffee place focused only on coffee on itself, a taste playground for us and of course for the customers. "It's amazing and also very nice for us to see how this small project is growing and growing," Nora continues. "It is an amazing experience to start our own business based on the dream of owning one's ideal coffee place, and to see afterwards that it worked out and people are accept- ing and loving it and appreciating us a lot. I am still touched to see our customers with Chapter One stickers on their phones and wallets. It is nice to see that our self-made brand is something that is now part of the city of Berlin." 53 www.baristamagazine.com