I co-founded Cafe Nido, a design-forward pop-up coffee shop in Los Angeles, and wrote everything it said for three years, from the Instagram to the internal brand guide. It grew into a $1.2M+ neighborhood institution.
The Brief:
Coffee in LA had gotten better, but the spaces had been sterilized: mobile orders, drive-throughs, and nowhere to sit. Cafe Nido was built to bring back the old coffeehouse idea, a place where strangers become friends. The brand promise was simple: Connect Through Coffee.
Cafe Nido’s Voice:
Most specialty coffee brands lead with expertise. For Cafe Nido, we decided to lead with an invitation. I wrote for Cafe Nido like a host, not a marketer. The goal was never to sound impressive. It was to sound like someone worth running into on a Saturday.
The Coffee Book
The Coffee Book was how Cafe Nido sounded, looked, and felt, written down so the experience held up no matter who was behind the counter. It was our internal brand guide covering voice, values, and hospitality standards
The Mission
Connect Through Coffee.
It’s not just something we say. It’s a promise. Because humans run on connection: to our work, to our craft, to each other.
Connect: We are connectors of people, ideas, and worlds.
Through: We use coffee as a vehicle to build community, family, and friendship.
Coffee: Coffee is a ritual we cherish. We help people start their day off right, every day.
Our Voice
We are…
Personable and friendly, not corporate and stuffy.
Open to new ideas, not stuck in our ways.
Modern, but not necessarily high-tech.
Serious about our craft, but we know how to laugh at ourselves.
Inclusive and inviting, not cold and pompous.
Human Centric. Cafe Nido is, more than anything, human and physical. We are, at our core, a reaction to the pandemic, to people crossing the street to avoid one another, to tables pushed outside and orders placed online. We like squiggly, handmade lines. Texture. Color, light, and nature. We are not about perfection. We are about being human.
The Non-Negotiables
A daily newspaper. A VHS always playing. A chessboard always out. A bookshelf always full.
Soul in the morning: Al Green, Etta James, Bobby Womack. By late morning we listen to songs from Mexico City, Medellín, and Rio — from salsa, to cumbia, and bossa nova. Afternoons turn to R&B and hip-hop. Pace is a design decision, not an accident.
From Voice to Service
The guide turned the brand into behavior at the counter:
Greet everyone, even when you’re slammed: “I see you. Be with you in just a minute.”
Never end on a no: “No should never be the last thing they hear. Always offer something.”
2. The Weekly Newsletter
Our weekly email to 370+ subscribers, with a 55% open rate. Written like a letter from a friend, not a promo blast. Here’s an excerpt:
Good morning.
It’s Monday, September 7th, and it sprinkled yesterday in Los Angeles. Which means the power was out, the internet was down, and the city was basically underwater. As the city recovers, I’m sipping on a honey-processed latte, and we’re excited for a great week ahead.
This Week at Cafe Nido
The 20th Nido Reading Club is Sunday, 7:30–10am. No signups, no assigned readings. Just people showing up to read, together. Bring a book and mention Reading Club at the register for 10% off.
What We’re Reading: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
I’m 100 pages into this beast of a book, and it’s been enjoyable, difficult, and yes, a little annoying.
Years are named after products. It’s set in some future country that swallows both Canada and the United States. None of it is explained, so you just have to figure it out. There’s a dizzying number of characters, some going by multiple names, including a triple agent who is pretending to pretend to be a spy, or something like that.
And famously, there are the endnotes, all inconveniently placed at the end of this 1,000-page behemoth. So you’re flipping an awkward, five-pound book back and forth through the entire fictional filmography of someone’s deceased father.
I’ve been oscillating between amused, confused, and annoyed, but I’m still going. It’s time to pick up the pace, or I’ll be trapped in this book for a long, long time.
3. Instagram
18,000+ followers, 63,000+ monthly impressions. Nearly all of it organic.
Although we didn’t rely on it, we treated the brand like a testable system — running targeted campaigns to shift slow-hour traffic, surveying customers to replace assumptions with data, and launching reading clubs and pop-ups specifically to increase reasons to return, not just reasons to visit once.
What we Built
A seven-figure annual business, built from the ground up. 18,000+ Instagram followers, 63,000+ monthly impressions. 370+ engaged weekly newsletter subscribers. A documented brand system — voice, values, training, and operations — that outlived any single person running it. A recurring calendar of reading clubs, workshops, and local partnerships that turned first-time visitors into regulars.
The Takeaway
Building Cafe Nido taught me that a brand isn't a logo or a campaign. It's a thousand small, consistent decisions, made long after the strategy meeting ends. That's the lesson I bring to every brand I work on next.