Café Bella
Aurora.
Building a coffee brand from family farms in Matagalpa to a Brooklyn pantry — my side project, my MBA, and the place I test every idea I learn at work.
The brief
From a family farm to a brand.
My family has grown coffee in Matagalpa, Nicaragua for three generations. For decades, the harvest went to commodity buyers who blended it into anonymous bags. In 2021, after a particularly hard year for prices, I asked a simple question: what would it take to sell this directly?
There was no brief. No client. Just a product, a story, and a designer who'd never run a business. I gave myself one rule — build it the way I'd want a real client to build it.
The approach
The brand had to be true first.
Specialty coffee is a crowded category full of beautiful brands that all kind of look the same — minimalist sans-serif, muted terracotta, vague mountains. I didn't want that. The product already had something most brands have to invent: a real place, real people, a real story.
The brand system is built around family handwriting, Nicaraguan colors, and the rhythm of the harvest. The name, Bella Aurora, comes from the farm itself — "beautiful dawn," the moment the pickers start. Every design decision had to pass one test: would my abuela recognize this as ours?
The build
Brand, packaging, store, repeat.
I designed the logotype, color palette, and pattern system in two weekends, then spent six months on packaging because every bag is a billboard. The Shopify storefront launched lean — four products, one origin story, fast shipping. Iterated on copy, photography, and bundle design every quarter based on what customers actually said in reviews.
Aurora.
The outcome
A small business that runs.
Bella Aurora isn't trying to be a Blue Bottle. It's a deliberately small, profitable side project that pays the farmers fairly and lets me practice business and brand work outside the safety of a big company. Every quarter has taught me something I take back to my day job.
What I took with me
Designers should ship something they own.
Bella Aurora taught me more about product than three years of meetings ever could. Pricing, supply chain, customer support, shipping insurance, inventory — the whole unsexy reality of making something exist in the world.
Every designer I know who's run their own small thing has better instincts because of it. It's the closest you can get to feeling what your stakeholders feel.