CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses self-harm.
In an era where even a basic brew can feel like a luxury, the idea of $3 coffee seems almost too good to be true. But according to Travel Guides’ Michael Teng and business whizz Young J. Lee, it’s all about shifting your mindset and making it happen. After all, why shouldn’t great coffee be accessible to everyone?
Harnessing Michael’s bubbly TV personality and Young’s cunning business sense, this unlikely partnership blossomed into a creative powerhouse determined to make a difference.
Sprung from a conversation in a cafe in Saigon, these two mates turned cafe innovators, founded ‘Bobby Stop Stealing Our Camping Chairs’ in the heart of Melbourne’s CBD, hoping to create a unique third space that combines coffee and community in a world that needs human connection more than ever.
And with a bold menu that consists of $3 long blacks and $4 ceremonial-grade matcha, they’re not playing around.
Despite epic road bumps like losing half their networth, tackling generational traumas and their socials being shut down by Meta a month before launching, Michael and Young sit before me smiling from ear to ear, keen to show off the brand they’ve created and the legacy they wish to leave.
Hi Michael and Young, tell us a little bit about a typical day here at Bobby, Stop Stealing Our Camping Chairs.
Young: I’ll come in around 6 am, and batch make the matcha in the morning, then Michael will come in around 6:50, and then we’ll start opening the store, put out the camping chairs, and have our morning rush.
Michael: The first customers are scared of us now because when they walk in, we scream, “WHAT’S UP?”
We’re here dapping them up, and they’ve just come off a bus from Bendigo or something; they are NOT awake yet. We try to change up our interactions so people can snap out of that trance of their daily commute.
How has life’s journey brought you to starting a cafe?
Michael: I love when sh-t gets really weird in my life, and so, it’s been comprised of seeing the world on Travel Guides and taking on very rogue projects. For example, I’m going to be on the new reboot of Wolf Creek! So that will be a little adventure.
And of course, my primary focus at the moment is starting this beautiful cafe!
Young: For me, I’m trying to live for a purpose that’s bigger than myself. I’d been doing business since I was 16, and financially, I was doing quite well, until two years back, where I lost nearly all of my net worth.
Growing up in this capitalist society, I think I was always living for myself and trying to make money and stuff. But after that crash, I had a little bit of an existential crisis, and came out of it wanting to live for a purpose bigger than myself.
So when Michael and I came up with Bobby, we wanted to have an impact on society in a certain way that actually adds value to other people’s lives.
So, currently in my life, I am behind the machine, I’m making affordable coffee for a lot of people. I think we’ve made about 10,000 cups so far in the past five weeks.
You commented about being in business from a really young age. I find that’s a really common pattern for kids who are first-generation immigrants. You almost feel a bit guilty, like you need to work really hard because your parents brought you here, they worked hard, and all you want is to build wealth so that they can retire. So how did you transition from the mindset of “Oh my God, I need to work really hard and make money”, to realising that you wanted to live for a bigger purpose?
Young: Growing up as an immigrant, you’re trying to fit into places. My parents gave up everything when they moved from Korea. They couldn’t buy me ice cream when other people were getting ice cream, so I just had to have a drive to make money for myself.
But I think the main transition happened after the loss two years ago, I was actually… I was suicidal, and I didn’t want to live anymore. I really hit rock bottom in my perspective.
This is where I learned to pivot. I lived every day like I’m already dead, so I might as well live every day trying to add value to people’s lives. Maybe the immigrant side is somewhere at the bottom of that, but that experience made me move mentally into seeking something more spiritually fulfilling rather than financial.
Michael, with your Vietnamese background, do you have a similar experience to that?
Michael: I know a lot of people who have been brought up with that immigrant mindset where they have to over-strive and create a living in order to support the family.
I was lucky that my mum put my sister through that first; she got that 99.95 ATAR, got a scholarship to Melbourne Uni — I think it put so much stress on her that she took the polar opposite approach on me.
Instead, she was like, “Michael, as long as you’re happy and you’re living your best life, life is too short”. It took a lot for my mum to be like, “Okay, maybe that immigrant mindset isn’t the best for my son”. So I’ve been blessed to be what some might call a ‘dropkick’ and to travel the world on Travel Guides.
And now with the shop, it’s been incredible to see my mum’s mind change from that initial: “You should do medicine, you should do law, you should do something that you know will be a rock for your life.”
She came into the coffee shop the other day, and she was like, “I can’t believe you created this. I’m proud. My son did this. My son did this sh-t.” And I think that that was probably one of the most beautiful moments that I’ve ever had in my life.
For me, that made every late night, every single nail I put in the roof, every single hour of no sleep, stress, like, worth it in that moment.
How did you two meet, and at what point along the way did you think, “Hey, maybe we should start a business together?”
Michael: We met up because a mutual mate knew we both wanted to start a business.
Young had this really core knowledge of business and the goals and aspirations that he’d achieved — and I think I gravitated heavily towards that.
Where we really mesh is that we have a really warped sense of creativity.
We find this one section of humour and creativity so ‘cooked’ that it’s hilarious to us. So that’s why I think we had the balls to create something really, really cooked but really, really fun that people will love.
So you had the audacity?
Michael: We had the audacity! If we told any other person, “Oh, we want to start a cafe called Bobby Stop Stealing Our Camping Chairs with grandmas drinking matcha and Vietnamese uncles as the logo,” they’d be like, “That is super strange. Let’s not do that.”
But for some reason, we thought it was great!
So why coffee, and why only $3?
Young: We were actually brainstorming this at a cafe in Saigon, and somehow that night we bumped into this guy who had the biggest coffee farm in Vietnam and got chatting to him about supplies.
Michael: Young loved coffee, I loved coffee, and we kind of sat and were like, “What is a big issue in Australia?” And obviously, it is the cost of living. That’s why we loved Vietnam! We can have three coffees a day because it’s so cheap, so we thought, “What if we created a space in Australia that was different, but also solved the cost of living issue by giving people affordable yet quality coffee.”
We couldn’t think of a place that has done that yet. We wanted to fuse the elements of being quirky, having a community, and being affordable.
Young: I think the cafe is our personalities merged into one. In a world full of technology and AI, I think that’s what humans need most: connection and community. And what better way than selling cheap coffee or matcha to bring people into a space so that they can hang out?
In terms of this idea of building community, I thought it was really interesting that when you were starting up, you were only doing pop-ups around Melbourne. Can you talk us through the strategy behind that?
Young: When cafes launch, a lot of people are not from business backgrounds. They hire a big, expensive space with high rent, and they’re already drowning in overheads. But I thought the best way for you to launch any kind of product is to test the market.
When you do pop-ups, you can see how people receive your product and how that current location is. You can start to build your socials and your followers before you even open, at a very minimal cost.
Let’s talk about social media a little bit. You guys had thoughtfully and successfully built yourself quite the online presence, documenting your journey leading up to securing this permanent spot. But then, months before opening, your page got taken down by Meta. Can you speak on the impact that had on you?
Michael: Oh, our lovely friends at Meta.
We actually had some really funky stuff teed up, and one day, our good friends at Meta — actually, AI Meta, thank you very much, not even Meta Meta, AI Meta — banned our account. If anyone has ever experienced Meta and their AI network, you cannot get in contact with a human. It is impossible. You’re fighting with a robot. And no one beats robots because they’re robots.
I was pretty devastated because we did work hard. I was like, “Damn, I really put my heart into that.”
After it happened, we gave ourselves two options. One: we fight for our lives to get it back against robots — and as I said before, no one beats robots — or two: we just wipe the slate clean and hope that everyone loves our brand, our core values and what we’re actually trying to build.
In retrospect, that was probably one of the best things to happen to Bobby, because it was very cloudy at the start in terms of what we wanted.
When I look at the growth from the first account to the second account, I’m actually stoked. Because we can now portray ourselves better. I’m grateful that we have this opportunity to kind of get that ball rolling again, and I think that was probably one of the best things to happen to Bobby — starting again.
Let’s address the elephant in the room: your cafe name. Who the hell is Bobby, and why is he stealing camping chairs?
Michael: Bobby is a little piece of all of us, rebellious and a bit cheeky.
When people ask us who Bobby is, it always kind of changes. There is no particular individual that Bobby is, but he’s just this figurative piece of us that keeps changing.
Young: As for the camping chairs, when a brand goes into a pop-up, it’s very hard to make that space feel like theirs. We thought of camping chairs because we felt that if you spread 10 camping chairs in the room, the space would feel like it belonged to us.
Because Melbourne’s so pretty, we wanted to give people camping chairs to take out into Melbourne, sit anywhere and enjoy
We pictured people getting a coffee, taking a camping chair out into nature, sitting down, and bringing it back… well, hopefully they bring it back. We were thinking a lot of people might steal them, that’s why it became: Bobby Stop Stealing Our Camping Chairs.
Have you had anyone steal any?
Michael: Yes. Quite a few. And we’ve had people threatening us on our TikTok like, “I’m coming to take your chairs.”
People are taking our crates! Our flowers! This sh-t is just direct theft.
Industry experts predict that a cup of coffee could surge to as high as $12 in the next three years due to economic factors. What do you say to that?
Michael: No f–king way. One thing that we hold strong to our core is that we will literally shut down the cafe before we change any of our base prices. As long as people keep coming and supporting us, we will keep doing this sh-t until we gotta sell our naked gnomes.
$12 is f–king insane.
Young: Our prices are going to remain. Even today, we cut down our alternative milk cost by nearly half. Those things, once negotiated, help us to survive.
If you guys weren’t doing your current job, what do you think each of you would be doing instead?
Michael (Answering for Young): If Young wasn’t doing this, I reckon he would start a business in children’s guidance counselling. Young likes to ‘talk life’, so I think if there are youngins around, he would be like — have you seen Kung Fu Panda? He gives me Master Oogway vibes. So he’ll sit there and like, shed his wisdom — specifically, in a temple in Asia somewhere.
Young (Answering for Michael): I reckon Michael could have actually gone off Travel Guides and started his own travel agency — like a very big, funky, totally different approach to travel, like a travel agency where you don’t know where you’re going. You just pay the money, and he organises it, puts a bag on your head, and you wake up somewhere crazy.
Michael: I would love that sh-t.
What’s the most unhinged thing you’ve seen at work that I can legally publish?
Michael: Yesterday was scary as sh-t. We were having a really good day, then a lovely gentleman sat on our camping chairs, so I went outside to have a chat.
He handed me a small metal angel. I thought it was a gift, so I looked at him and said, “This is really sweet,” and he goes, “Ha, jokes, it’s the Devil.”
Instead of throwing it across the street, I just awkwardly laughed for a very long time, dropped it on a crate, walked away, and washed my hands. I had to get Young to dispose of it with chopsticks because it was freaking me out. I’m Asian, man, I believe in Feng Shui, and that had bad juju for sure.
Young: For me, one of the funniest was when we were setting up the store. Michael was angle-grinding these metal bits down, and this guy came over, took out ten dish sponges from his bag, and started throwing them at Michael through the door. They were just bouncing off his head while he’s angle-grinding with sparks flying everywhere. He was just lobbing an endless bag of dishwashing sponges at his head. Then, once the bag was empty, he just stared at us and proceeded on his journey.
Who do you admire in your industry?
Michael: I really admire Gordon Ramsay.
Young: Same.
Michael: I think that he has this knack of ‘saying it how it is’, and he’s just so invested in his craft that it is so entertaining to watch. I watch him so much hungover, and it cures me, it cures my soul.
Young: Yeah, I think he’s very good.
Michael: Him, and that Japanese guy who eats hella hot dogs. I admire him too.
Young: Oh my god, yeah! I don’t know his name, but I love that guy.
Describe your inbox or DMs in three words.
Michael/Young: Soulful. Seen. Love. Because we’re so busy running the store, we leave a lot of people on ‘seen’, but it’s all love.
Last one: How do you sign off your emails?
Michael/Young: “From the Bobby Boys” or “Love, Bobby Boys.” Or “Love, Bobby Boys — you better stop stealing our camping chairs, or we’ll throw a table at you and steal your shoes and sell them on eBay.” Unless you’re Gordon Ramsay, then “Love Kitchen Nightmares.”
If you need mental health support, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or chat online.
Under 25? You can reach Kids Helpline at 1800 55 1800 or chat online.
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If you require immediate assistance, please call 000
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