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This is how two brothers took the long, uncool, small-town route to becoming one of SA’s fastest scaling coffee brands…

The Bredell brothers weren’t born or raised in any of the “cool”, sexy cities of SA. No, as Stephan Bredell puts it, they were “the sons of a miner”. Their father was a mining engineer, which meant a childhood spent moving from one small mining town to another.

You couldn’t get further from the big city startup narrative than Virginia or Welkom in the Free State. But it was here that they learnt a unique founding strategy everyone overlooks: In small towns, there’s often still an architect, an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer. There’s real money. And disposable income. 

Yet the big brands tend to start in Cape Town and Joburg, assuming the rest of the country behaves in the same way.

So when he and his brother Petrus founded Plato Coffee, they didn’t sprint for the saturated, high-standard, high-rent zones to fight for attention in a crowded city. Smaller towns had far less competition and much lower-hanging fruit.

But before we can get there, a few foundational steps that helped make Plato what it is today…

The corporate lab, coffee economics and a lemonade stand

Though most would describe Plato as speciality coffee, the brand is 100% anti-snobbery: A lesson Stephan learnt one day when his pregnant wife “dared ask” for a decaf option at one of the trendy coffee places and got silently judged for ordering the “wrong” drink.

It wasn’t inclusive, and he wanted community, sparking the idea of the name Plato, a reflection of ancient Athens, where people met at marketplaces and discussed big ideas in the public square. 

Lesson 1: That’s what a coffee place should be, inclusive.

He wasn’t in that business yet, though. At the time, Stephan had a startup that benefited from an Eskom rebate programme, getting 150 LED and heat pump installation jobs in short order. Enough for him to take a gamble, fly to China and purchase a lot of energy-saving equipment, only for Eskom to pull the plug on the programme and the business falling flat on its face.

Lesson 2: Don’t build a business around corporate levers you can’t control. Keep it simple, like a lemonade stand: Lemons, sugar, water. Pay me. Bye-bye.

A few years later, while working as a full-time ideator at King Price Insurance, he had to run a café concept inside the company. A project that clearly showed him the downside of food service (waste, theft, complexity, spoilage) compared to the unusually clean business of coffee.

Lesson 3: Strip away the chicken, cheese and wastage. Focus on good coffee; at scale, focusing on unit economics and control.

Bootstrapping, a cemetery and first proof

In 2019, they had the opportunity to test the concept. Not in Canal Walk or Sandton City, and while Stephan was still holding down a corporate gig, Plato Coffee was born as a single container shop in Irene, a small village between Pretoria and Centurion, right next to a cemetery.

An insane location, until you consider it was near 700 houses in a high-LSM security village, next door to a school. In essence, a place of community, with none of those snobby coffee places around. 

Which is perhaps why it was successful enough to fuel expansion into small towns from Rustenburg to Polokwane, Mbombela to Secunda — places with around 25k people, where you can become a top shop, where Vida e Caffè, Seattle and Bootlegger fear to tread.

By building the business around community and school runs, Plato soon became a part of the rhythm of life.

A franchise model built on relational capital

One of the biggest turning points was when Plato shifted from owning all the shops to selling shops. It was a natural move, since coffee has “relational capital,” where your shop becomes a social place. And that just works better when it’s run by a hands-on owner from within the community.

They began selecting community builders, owner-operators in small towns, even stripping away a manager salary in their numbers, since they assume each shop will be run by the owner themself. And it became their growth strategy.

And man, did it grow. Stephan explains that, because they had stripped away all the complexities normally associated with food service, they could use data to build consistency: Strict espresso recipes of 20g of coffee in, 30 seconds out mean baristas can't over- or under-extract, helping ensure every cup of Plato tastes as good in Secunda as it does in Stellenbosch.

When it works, it just works

Today, they’ve built a truly attractive system for any entrepreneur to buy into. The unit economic heuristics are super clean. They work on a 300 regular rule: If you have 300 regulars, you’re making money. Because it means the shop sells about 300 cups a day at roughly R35 a cup, which is R10’000 a day, R300’000 a month.

And with a gross margin of around 55 to 60%, you can build a viable operation.

It’s why they could greenlight expansion into Zimbabwe: An owner who understood their model and could execute locally. Similarly, they have someone expanding to London (a 15-year local) who believes they can sell 2’000 cappuccinos a day at £4 each.

“Isn’t that what entrepreneurship is all about?” Stephan says, “Being ‘dumb enough’ to try something crazy, but smart enough to structure your bet so the downside is survivable and the upside meaningful.”

As for the future, Stephan hints at using coffee’s magnetic power to expand Plato into a lifestyle brand. Running clubs. Cycling culture. Collabing on products like beach towels… from here, almost nothing seems impossible.

We’re keen to see how they continue building where others aren’t looking in 2026 and beyond. 🔥

The SA retailer’s system was battling ongoing payroll and leave issues, requiring constant fixes, repeated updates and regular consultant support just to keep things running. The payroll team spent most of their time putting out fires instead of improving processes.

That’s why they moved to Deel Local Payroll, powered by Payspace, a fully cloud-based solution that the team could easily manage internally. 

The result? Payroll processing that used to take four days to complete now only takes half a day. Downtime disappeared, audits became easier, and store staff gained mobile access. Most importantly, the payroll team finally had time to focus on improving how the business runs.

Less admin. More impact.

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