CAFFÈ UNIMATIC — Stylish Storyteller

MEET ELISABETH CARDIELLO, FOUNDER OF CAFFÈ UNIMATIC, A NEW YORK-BASED COFFEE COMPANY THAT SELLS THE UNIMATIC— A LIMITED-SUPPLY OF ITALIAN DRIP PERCOLOTORS INVENTED BY ELISABETH’S LATE FATHER IN BROOKLYN AND MADE IN ITALY IN 1962.

CARDIELLO ALSO FOUNDED BRAVE CONVERSATIONS OVER COFFEE, WHICH ENCOURAGES CONNECTION AND OPENS UP DIALOGUES ABOUT DIFFICULT TOPICS FOR PERSONAL GROWTH AND DISCOVERY.

CARDIELLO IS CARRYING ON HER FATHER’S LEGACY WHILE CREATING HER OWN THROUGH CONNECTION AND CONVERSATION OVER COFFEE.

Coffee symbolizes many things: potential, progress, and for decades coffee has been the vehicle over which connections are made and topics are discussed at length in business and casual settings. The phrase “Let’s meet over coffee,” has become an integral strategy for professional networking and way to get to know someone or catch up in a laid back atmosphere while sipping your favorite coffee drink.

Through the last year with the COVID-19 pandemic, connection has never felt more important and vital, and enjoying a cup of coffee with friends or family—in person or virtually—is just one way to feel connected to each other, and one New York coffee company has prioritized connecting with customers and facilitating difficult conversations since it was founded in 2011.

Elisabeth Cardiello founded Caffè Unimatic in 2011, which sells The Unimatic, a drip percolator, which is designed to brew a perfect, smooth cup of coffee. Designed in Brooklyn by Cardiello’s late father Peter and made in Italy in 1962, the Unimatic has found homes worldwide.

After Cardiello’s father passed in 2010, she discovered 5,000 Unimatics in storage and wanted to find a way to connect with him and continue his legacy — and Caffè Unimatic was born.

“My father was a quintessential Italian entrepreneur and we started a bunch of things over the years, but his favorite business that he talked about all the time was a cookware company called United Cookware,” Cardiello says.

“They distributed in the states and in Italy, they had a little bit of everything for the kitchen and the one thing they didn’t have was a coffee pot — so he created one. He took the way his mom’s stove in Southern Italy and combined that with an automatic percolator, which was revolutionary at the time; united and automatic combined is Unimatic.”

“My whole life he owned a restaurant, and what I thought was the inventory closet, which was filled with Unimatics, was actually a door to a warehouse,” Cardiello says.

“It was one of those moments where your life flashes before your eyes and it was a moment of, ‘Ok, Elisabeth, you don’t know what you want to do in life, but that coffee pot that you’re staring at, that thing kept you and your dad and your mom at the table together for hours beyond what we normally would have stayed at the table before’ because it was like ‘there’s more coffee in the pot, just finish the pot’ that was my entire life,” Cardiello says.

“When I stopped for second it was almost like I could see the pictures of me growing up and the coffee pot was on the table and that was always the same, and we all grew up and it was a moment where I was like, if I can give those moments of connection and conversation to other families, I’m in.”

The Unimatic has been featured in goop, NBC, Forbes, GQ, Go Daddy and others. An accomplished speaker in addition to a successful entrepreneur, Cardiello also gave a TEDx Talk about ‘How a coffee pot changed her life.’ “If I knew when I was in college to think through like ‘wait a minute, is there a physical thing that embodies all of your values?’ but when I think about it now, what is the one thing that encompasses all my values? It’s coffee, because it’s communication, it’s daily inspiration, positive forward movement, it’s connection.”

Elisabeth Cardiello, founder of Caffe Unimatic and BRAVE Conversations Over Coffee

Cardiello says when she first started the company, she knew she needed to make the product hers and create her version of it — which was to create the smoothest cup of coffee by roasting the coffee the way it’s brewed. The Unimatic is a vintage drip-percolator, paired with Caffe Unimatic coffee blends, is roasted specifically for the way it’s brewed. The Unimatic brews 4.5 cups of coffee and developed a line of three roasted coffee blends including the Roma Bionda, a light, clean roast with tasting notes of milk chocolate, basil and licorice; San Pietro Brunetta, a medium, smooth roast with tasting notes of dark chocolate, hazelnut and spices; and Milano Mora, a bright, bold roast with tasting notes of cucumber, walnut and blood orange peel.

Caffè Unimatic’s sustainable roasted coffee blends.

Instead of calling it purchasing, the company terms it as adopting a Unimatic. “We started finding these original Unimatics new homes and people name them,” Cardiello says. “I get letters from people who name their Unimatic and say ‘Enzo is part of our life now’ and ‘Here’s Rosa’ and it’s the sweetest thing.”

Caffè Unimatic also gained popularity for being featured in Netflix’s Coffee for All in 2017, a documentary that goes into detail about coffee production in New York, Naples, Italy and Buenos Aires. Cardiello and Caffè Unimatica were recommended to the documentary producers by one of Cardiello’s friends, writer Robert Galinksky, who was writing Coffee: The Musical.

“The producers wanted to tell my story, so we filmed it in New York and they followed me to Italy and it launched and it was beautiful,” Cardiello says. “Then the website blew up and I got a phone call and they said ‘you might see an uptick in activity, we sold the documentary to Netflix.’

“We were in 9 or 10 countries before the documentary, but now I’ve lost count, it’s been this really beautiful experience of, they say you build the thing you need and in the beginning, to be honest, I just needed to keep telling my dad’s story, it started out as a lovely way to keep his legacy alive and to keep him at the table with us and to make our tradition of lingering at the table something that other families did too, and evolved into me realizing I needed to leave my own legacy.” After writing her father’s eulogy, Cardiello realized she wasn’t on the right path for her life, and so she wrote her own eulogy and in it, included coffee and conversation.

Cardiello is also the founder of BRAVE Conversations Over Coffee, a program for corporate and students that facilitates difficult discussions through listening and receiving techniques, and it grew a lot in 2020 due to the pandemic.

“BRAVE is an acronym that stands for the way that we listen in those sessions, and go over how important it is to listen a certain way... I hope people leave with the skillset to listen in a way that makes someone else feel safe enough to be vulnerable if they want to be. I don’t believe you can ask someone to do that, but the way you listen can change someone else’s perception of their own feeling of safety, and psychological safety is the most important thing that we can give to another person.”

Cardiello hosts BRAVE Conversations in corporate settings for businesses and at colleges. “We give people ways to start and have difficult conversations about anything from mental health to race to inclusion to burnout...the goal is to bring people together around a ‘table’ people who believe something different, because the framework was created to bring people together and see the underlying humanness.”

As part of the college BRAVE Conversations group, Cardiello incorporates Legacy Out Loud, a confidence-creating methodology she founded that empowers the next generation of young women leaders. At the University of Nebraska, Cardiello teaches young women in their entrepreneurship program how to facilitate BRAVE Conversations twice a week.

“They began with no women starting businesses and only 25% of their leadership were women; to 53% of women starting their own businesses and 75% of the leadership are women after gaining confidence through BRAVE Conversations,” Cardiello says.

For companies, they hold three or more sessions for an executive team or different groups or teams who then collectively teach the company the new listening techniques. Cardiello also follows-up with the companies to see their progress since implementing the BRAVE framework.

"A coffee pot kept my family and I at the table for hours and I wanted to give those moments of connection and conversation to other families.
"Coffee embodies my values: it's communication, daily inspiration and positive forward movement — it’s connection.”

Looking back, Cardiello says her goal from the beginning with Caffè Unimatic was to have an impact on people every morning and know their customers—and that hasn’t changed. She also knew early on the company wanted to use a direct-to-consumer model when selling the Unimatics and their own coffee in a subscription service delivery model.

“I fell in love with the direct to consumer model and it didn’t make sense to others until last year with lockdowns in place—so we have always done things differently, and we were never competing with the coffee shop across the street—we help our customers make better coffee at home.”

Cardiello cites sharing her personal story, actively listening and enthusiasm for Caffè Unimatic and BRAVE Conversations as strengths that have helped the company grow. “My company didn’t start because it was a company, it started with a business idea, I had the story before it was anything that could make a dime, so I think most companies start with an idea or a product, then you have to tell people why it matters—without wanting to I started the opposite way, I had this deep feeling of why this matters so much and then I was like, ‘Well let’s put a business around it,’” Cardiello explains.

“I think that helped too because I wasn’t wed to a business plan, I wasn’t wed to ‘this has to look this way or I’ve failed,’ and I didn’t have a metric for success, I was just like ‘I’m going to put this out there and see if people care, see if people like the way the Unimatic works’ and in some ways just letting the market tell me what it cared about and moving forward that way.”

“I’ve always told it how it is and I’ll do whatever it takes to make it work and I think allowing ourselves to be human and talking about someone passing away or talking about hard things, I think when people are able to see part of themselves in you, it’s like ‘I could do that too, it’s possible,’ or you remind them of the things that matter most allows you to connect with people beyond a product. I think having such a weird and personal story behind what I’ve been doing has kept me focused on my values, which makes it easier for me to make decisions because if it’s not within the values of the company, we won’t do it.”

Cardiello says the most rewarding aspect of Caffè Unimatic and BRAVE Conversations Over Coffee are the customer feedback, letters and emails she receives from customers who have adopted a Unimatic, purchased their coffee or participated in a BRAVE Conversation and it’s changed their lives.

“I recently got a letter that said ‘My dad and I have been fighting for years and I thought our relationship was over, but after getting to know the BRAVE framework, I was able to have a brave conversation with him and in one conversation healed three decades of fighting because I changed the way that I listened.’” Cardiello says.

“My company didn’t start because it was a company, it started with a business idea, I had the story before it was anything that could make a dime, so I think most companies start with an idea or a product, then you have to tell people why it matters—without wanting to I started the opposite way, I had this deep feeling of why this matters so much and then I was like, ‘Well let’s put a business around it.”

“I get stories like that all the time, ‘I’ve revolutionized my relationship with my family, I changed the way I feel at work and this happened’ the results people send me, it’s one of those things where, you know you do this because that can be the outcome,” Cardiello says. “I’m so grateful people keep in touch and update me later on, you know you’re doing something impactful but when people take the time to share it with you...with every coffee pot or subscription order, I still write notes to everyone and there are some people that have sent me pictures of every note that I wrote them...the kind of people that we attract are the greatest.”