Hannah loves making coffee, and she loves the fast-paced environment of the shop she works at. If she’s doing her job well, she’s getting customers in and out of the drive-thru window within 90 seconds, all with a smile on her face. After she takes an order, she asks each customer how their day is going and where they’re headed. When Hannah describes the job, she sounds like countless other drink slingers: “I love it. Making coffee is obviously so fun and I like how fast-paced it is,” she told RANGE this week. “People are in and out — we try to have 90 second window times.”
So when a man visiting Spokane from Texas looked at her in awe and asked if he could Facetime his son to show him the coffee stand, Hannah said it was a stark reminder — she isn’t just making coffee. She’s doing it in lingerie.
Hannah works for Black Sheep Coffee Co., a chain of lingerie coffee stands (commonly called bikini baristas). A decade ago in Spokane, stands like this operated under a variety of different names like Big Shots, Devil’s Brew and XXXtreme Espresso. Now, of the seven coffee stands left in the county where baristas work in bikinis, lingerie and other revealing outfits. Black Sheep operates six of them. Across Spokane, the buildings are all marked by the same black paint and white sheep’s skull.
The Black Sheep locations are discrete. From a distance, it’s not immediately obvious there’s anything unique going on inside Hannah’s location, though there are hints, like a banner reading “Ladies $1 Off.” A second banner that is partially hidden from certain angles reads, “Topless Tuesdays and Thursdays.” An old sign from when the stand used to be a Devil’s Brew is on the corner of the lot. (The brand is a little more risque on their website and social media, where the sheep’s head logo is also accompanied by the slogan, “It’s the tits.”)
The controversy has died down, too. Starting more than a decade ago, shops like Black Sheep were the center of a local culture war around nudity, zoning laws and bodily autonomy that lasted for years. Sarah Birnel, the owner of the Black Sheep chain, thinks the taboo and controversial elements were “part of the allure,” of the business model.
“We were getting picketed by church groups and we had to go before city council at [Spokane] Valley and, and Spokane city, just to even decide if we were legal and not adult entertainment. It was really wild,” Birnel said.
The push to ban bikini baristas fizzled after Spokane Valley passed a law requiring them to cover up slightly, and a separate ballot initiative to create a misdemeanor crime of “unlawful public exposure,” failed to gather enough signatures. By the time an Everett law even more strict than Spokane Valley’s was deemed constitutional in 2019, no one in Spokane was still seriously talking about a ban. Today there are no protesters, no firestorms, no hate comments on the frequent Facebook posts of tanned women in bikinis posing in shop windows or on motorcycles. It’s all quiet on the Northwestern front for bikini baristas.
“I find it unfortunate for a lot of reasons,” Birnel said. “I’m like, ‘what’s happening to society, that this is not like a special secret taboo kind of thing anymore?’”
There is one exception, but the controversy there isn’t really about bikinis. 2nd Base Espresso in Hillyard, perhaps the only remaining lingerie stand in Spokane that isn’t part of the Black Sheep chain, has caught heat for its sexual advertisements and readerboard sign that has displayed vulgar, racist and transphobic messages.
But though the business-generating taboo has been mostly neutralized by the balm of time and increased cultural acceptance, bikini barista stands are still around and profitable — both a gem in Birnel’s business portfolio and a good economic advancement opportunity for young women willing to brave the Spokane winters in their skivvies.
Black Sheep, Blissful Blends, business models
Birnel’s path to pairing brews and bikinis began in 2012. The coffee stand Birnel had both owned and worked in for years was struggling to pull in profit. In an effort to save her livelihood, she looked around the state at what other successful coffee stand owners were doing. That’s how she discovered bikini baristas.
“I thought, ‘Well, I could do that business model. That doesn’t bother me at all,’” Birnel said. So, she converted her stand, a move that boosted both her profits and traffic. Soon, she bought more distressed locations cheap, and implemented a similar model.
Fast forward more than a decade, and Birnel is the owner of 12 total coffee stands: fully-clad baristas staff six Blissful Blends stands, where the coffee is good if you like it sweet. The other six are the Black-Sheep-branded bikini barista stands, where the coffee is exactly the same, but customers pay an extra 50 cents to be served by an attendant in lace, mesh and/or pasties.
Birnel, a former felon and author of the book Something Better Brewing: What I learned from prison, parenthood and pouring coffee, is a savvy business owner: whenever she acquired a coffee stand that wasn’t performing well on its own, she turned it into a lingerie stand.
The lingerie coffee stands, she said, didn’t have to be placed on highly trafficked streets to be successful. Their profits come from cultivating a customer base of regulars who keep coming back to interact with their favorite baristas.
Birnel says the shops she turned into Black Sheeps are more profitable than they were before she bought and staffed them with bikini baristas, but they often don’t make as much money as her Blissful Blends stands do. They allow her to thrive in locations where others have struggled. “They broaden my market so much,” Birnel said.
There’s a trade-off, though. Birnel can charge more for the drinks at Black Sheep, but only to about half of her potential customers. At Black Sheep, women get a dollar off.
Birnel doesn’t feel like there are appreciably greater safety risks at the Black Sheep stands than at her Blissful Blends stands.
Which isn’t to say things are totally safe.
“There’s always safety concerns in this industry in general,” she said. “It’s not any different than at Blissful because there are girls alone in a tiny box, sometimes when it’s dark outside.”
Birnel’s stands include a panic button and most of them have bathrooms inside so they don’t have to leave the stand (though a few, including the one Hannah works at, rent bathroom space in a nearby business). Birnel doesn’t allow walk-ups, to keep people from harassing baristas. She trains her staff on who to call in the event of an emergency. When baristas expressed interest in carrying firearms at work, she brought a police officer to give her employees training.
Shay — a general manager for the Black Sheep chain who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her safety — agreed with Birnel. She’s worked for Birnel in various capacities for seven years as a barista and as a manager at both Blissful Blends and Black Sheep locations. She wishes people better understood how lingerie coffee shops function.
“The girls aren’t doing anything extra,” Shay said. “It’s a very hi-bye situation. I really wish that more people would just try it out and go through the stand and kind of see for themselves, because I think a lot of the people that have negative feelings towards the lingerie stands have never even been through. They’re never even talked to the girls.”
When you do talk to “the girls,” as RANGE did, it becomes clear lingerie coffee stands aren’t just profitable for Birnel.
‘It’s the tits!’
Hannah stumbled into bikini barista-ing more than three years ago, completely by accident.
She was scrolling through Indeed, submitting her resume to every barista job that was hiring at the time. She was contacted by the general manager at the time who invited her to one of the shops for a working interview. “She said, ‘Come on in, it’s Miniskirt Monday,’” Hannah said. “So I came in in like, a full button-up blouse and a miniskirt.”
Hannah isn’t originally from Spokane and had never seen a lingerie coffee shop before, so she was caught off guard when she arrived. She thought it was weird at first, but decided to give it a try. It stuck.
“You kind of forget that you’re in lingerie and it just feels like a normal, barista job,” she says, except for the days men from Texas ask to FaceTime their interactions.
And just like a normal barista job, employees at Black Sheep stands make a minimum hourly wage and keep all their tips. The difference is in the amount. Having worked both Black Sheep and Blissful Blends stands, Shay estimates employees at Black Sheep stands make “like two to three times more than they would at a regular stand. Maybe even more than that.”
Of course, how good tips are depends on the day — Topless Thursdays and Fridays (which don’t have a theme) are the busiest times, Shay said. As with all service work, tips can fluctuate with the baristas’ personality.
A job opening currently posted on their social media says the ideal candidate to work at the Black Sheep chain is at least 21 years old, available afternoons and weekends and has a “great attitude (:”. Their website says they are “always on the hunt for someone who is passionate about crafting a quality cup of coffee, superior customer service with a smile, & a team-player.”
Birnel’s ideal candidate doesn’t change based on whether she’s hiring for Black Sheep or Blissful. She’ll be “bubbly, positive, [and have] a good work ethic.” She said that often, the women who make the most money and last the longest are moms or students working to put themselves through school. The women who are trying to build a better life for themselves are always better employees, she said.
Tiffany, a barista at the Black Sheep on Houston Avenue, has been with the chain for about two years, and seemed to fit Birnel’s dream employee to a tee — she’s attentive, bubbly and needed the extra cash to cover the cost of school. “College is really expensive, so I thought, ‘why not try it out?’” she said. “I make really good money working here. I got this job to pay off college and I was able to do that, so that was a win for me.”
On top of the hourly wage and the higher tips, baristas at Black Sheep stands also have access to what Shay described as “additional income opportunities.” Every year, the company puts out a calendar with photos of the bikini baristas and sells them to customers. It’s optional for employees to pose, Shay said, but if they sell a calendar with their shot in it, they get a commission of around $5 for every copy of the calendar.
“It’s modeling work for them. They love it,” Shay said. “Our girls that are in it, they have a very easy time selling the calendar and then we’re able to put that on their paycheck.” The baristas also have control over their likeness. Though Hannah let the Texan send video of her to his son for free, Shay said that all baristas can charge whatever rate they want to have their photo taken.
She said customers often surreptitiously try to snap pics of their baristas, so by instituting a no photography without consent policy and letting workers ask for whatever tip amount would make them feel comfortable with having their picture taken, it puts the power back in employees’ hands.
“We have a sign on the windows just saying ‘Please ask for consent.’ These are humans. There are girls that don’t really want their photos out there,” Shay said. “So, the girls are allowed to charge whatever they want.”
Shay, Hannah and Tiffany all spoke positively of their experiences as bikini baristas, but it’s not an industry without flaws.
The cold and rain are more of a factor in lingerie, and because her location doesn’t have its own bathroom, Hannah told RANGE she has to trek from the stand to a bathroom in a separate building in her purple bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. Shay mentioned minor safety concerns.
At least for the baristas we spoke with, though, the flaws are far outweighed by the perks: the compensation, the schedule, the other employees (who are also hired specifically for their perky personalities) and the freedom to make your day, and others’.
“You get to go in there, you get to listen to your music. You kind of set the tone,” Shay said. “You get to be the highlight of people’s day.”
Perhaps surprisingly, there are also opportunities for advancement.
Shay, Hannah and Tiffany all started out solely slinging coffee. Now, Shay is Black Sheep’s general manager, while Hanah and Tiffany were recently promoted to be the site managers for their respective stand locations.
Hannah’s promotion came about a year ago, and while it’s harder and comes with additional job responsibilities on top of her barista schedule, she told RANGE she loves it.
Shay says she is using her position as a sort of on-the-job MBA. “I wanted to learn more about what it takes to have a business,” Shay said. “I would love to own my own stand one day. I think that’s everyone’s dream that’s been in the coffee industry for a while.”
Not everyone stays for as long as the three baristas we spoke to. Not everyone becomes a manager (although we did learn that, if you go to a Black Sheep before noon, chances are your barista will be one). Not everyone enjoys the work or thrives in it. But for those who do, it can be a reliable source for extra cash during the summer months, or a more long-term springboard for economic mobility.
“I think that’s the point of it when you’re going to school or if you’re in debt or you have kids,” Shay said, “or whatever your situation is where you need to make good money on a good schedule.”
For that, she says, “I think it’s ideal, but it’s not forever. And everyone knows that.”
