Living the Sweet Life: How Three College Friends Changed the Entertainment Landscape of Washington D.C.

Starting a business is a lot like starting a band.

It takes more than a few dedicated individuals working hard to achieve a common goal, it takes more than hours of practice and a 24/7 commitment, and it takes more than living your values day in and day out.

It takes a unique and rare chemistry among one another; a creative ebb and flow of ideas that can only exist between like-minded individuals.

Of course, it takes all of those other things as well.

But as Nicolas Jammet, Nathaniel Ru and Jonathan Neman, founders of D.C.’s salad and culture titan Sweetgreen, will tell you, above all else, it takes a special working bond among one another in order to succeed.

“Really, it’s recognizing the value of the people you surround yourself with,” says Jammet. “It’s all about finding a perfect complement to your skill set.”

In five short years, Sweetgreen grew from a quaint, trendy but tiny M Street salad shop in Georgetown to something of a local phenomenon, with 13 restaurants spanning three states and the District of Columbia.

It also puts on one of the area’s biggest and best music festivals, the Sweetlife Food & Music Festival, which, in its first three years, featured performances from the likes of The Strokes, Crystal Castles, The Shins, Kid Cudi, Avicii, Explosions in the Sky, Fitz and the Tantrums, Hot Chip, Lupe Fiasco, Girl Talk and tons more.

But how did three wide-eyed business school kids go from squeezing every last dime into a 500-square-foot salad shop in Georgetown to the District’s hottest young entrepreneurs and festival planners?

Well, it took hours upon hours of hard work, dedication and perseverance, sure, but as Neman points out, “It all started with our love of music.” A love of music and a love of food, of course.

Neman, Ru and Jammet first met at Georgetown University, where they were all enrolled in the business program.

As freshmen, Neman and Jammet were neighbors in the same dorm, and they soon became friends with Ru through classes. The three quickly “bonded over food, or rather, the lack of good food in Georgetown,” Jammet remembers.

As business majors the three of them all took the same entrepreneurship class, which would eventually inspire them to come up with the idea for the first Sweetgreen.

“There was no place in the area to go eat healthy, good, transparent food in a cool setting, so we thought, ‘Let’s build one ourselves,’” Jammet recalls as one of the earliest ideas for developing a plan to open up a restaurant together while they were still in school.

Jammet also says that all three of them “came from entrepreneurial backgrounds...and from an early age [they] all found the value in that.”

Thus, the idea for all of them to go in on opening their own restaurant at such a relatively young age never seemed far-fetched to them.

Come senior year, Jammet, Neman and Ru began moving forward with their restaurant plan.

“The first thing we did is make t-shirts that said ‘Sweetgreen’ and started wearing them every day,” says Jammet. “None of us had many classes senior year, so this project became our focus.”

As self-proclaimed foodies and purveyors of wholesome, healthy living and local produce, they had an idea of what they would serve, and the angle they would take would become the Sweetgreen menu we know today. But their first big stepping stone was to find a place to house their new restaurant.

Neman lived across the street from a vacant store space that was a perfect location for the first Sweetgreen.

But locking down the location was no easy feat.

“We found this perfect place on 33rd and M Street; Jon kept trying to call the landlord, but she wouldn’t take a meeting with us,” remembers Jammet. “She thought we weren’t serious because we were so young, so Jon called every day for something like 30 or 40 days, and finally she agreed to take a meeting as long as we stopped calling her.”

Of course, that meeting would prove to be a monumental one for the trio, as something about Jammet, Neman and Ru sparked something in the landlord, and she told them to come back with a proper business plan and they’d talk.

Soon after, they started negotiations with an architect and began looking for investors for their restaurant, which also proved to be more than difficult.

“Proving your business to someone when they’re going to write a check is a huge thing,” Jammet says.

But they were victorious in their efforts. Jammet remembers, “We raised the money and opened our store, a little later than planned, about two months after graduation.”

The Georgetown location became a huge success, and the trio was looking to open a second location in Dupont, but they knew if their business was to succeed it would have to become more than a restaurant.

It had to become a brand. “Music, from day one, was a really important part of the company,” Jammet recalls. “There’s an emotional connection with music, so we wanted to create that same connection with food in our stores,” adds Neman, and this was to become a central part of Sweetgreen’s success.

Neman recalls the early days after the opening of the Dupont Circle location being difficult; no one was coming. “So we decided to buy a giant speaker from Guitar Center and start playing music outside to attract people.” He adds, “We pointed the speaker towards the circle and started blasting music and invited our friends to come check it out, and it created this energy.”

They did this a few weekends in a row, and it became a huge hit. Soon they decided to put on a full-on block party in an empty parking lot behind Dupont Circle and booked some DJs and local bands to play. It was a smashing success.

They then decided to take it to the next level and put on a music festival in the same lot.

They booked smaller local bands alongside national acts like Hot Chip and U.S. Royalty in what was the inaugural Sweetlife Festival.

But the next year they went even bigger, booking Merriweather Post Pavilion as the venue and The Strokes, one of Neman, Jammet and Ru’s favorite bands, as the headliner. It was a huge success.

But for Jonathan, Nic and Nathaniel, the success of Sweetgreen and the Sweetlife Festival goes beyond a successful music festival and a number of locations to the values they promote.

“If you ask what the Sweet life is,” says Jammet, “it’s the intersection between passion and purpose.”

Early on, the trio came up with a list of core values that defined the company, a move that has become the basis for Sweetgreen’s unique brand.

According to Jammet, the values “were things that [we] always talked about and taught our employees, and as we started to grow, we wanted to put these down on paper to ensure that every decision we make goes through these filters...having these core values, understanding them and owning them, is the most successful thing we’ve done,” he adds.

There’s no question that the future is looking bright for the Sweetgreen guys.

When we first ran this story, they had just opened their seventh D.C. location at City Vista downtown, and I’m sure they had plans to open more locations, but at the time, nothing was set in stone.

As Jammet puts it, “We like to let things grow organically out of our core business,” which is how the Sweetlife Festival got started. Like a band, Sweetgreen started out of a shared “love of music,” says Ru, and as a band their work is completely organic.

They bounce ideas off each other, and if it feels right, they go for it. It’s a method that’s proven successful for them in the past and is sure to be successful for them in the future, because they trust each other, and trust their abilities to grow together as friends, partners and as a company.

“It really is like a band,” Neman adds, “you need chemistry to work off each other.”

From the MO print archive: this story first ran in The Future Issue of Meets Obsession Magazine. It is a snapshot of the company at the time, and Sweetgreen and its festival have changed a lot since.

• Words: Matt Cohen
• Photographer: Kate Reeder (founders portrait)
• Festival photos: Courtesy photo