[INTERVIEW] Roasting coffee with a purpose - Unity coffee

Do you have a friend who is a coffee snob?

My friend Danny, will measure the weight of the coffee and water, hand grind coffee beans and brew with specific temperature. Anyway, he introduced me this amazing coffee brand called Unity, where the people care very much about their craft. Literally it's one of the best coffee i've ever had in my life.

I reached out to one of the founders, Tyler, and asked if I can interview him to understand how and why he started this brand. And here’s the video!

Design Thinking is more than just thinking

#designthinking has been trendy in tech companies or startups. More and more high education institutes offer Design Thinking courses (and yes I’ve been benefited from this trend and got hired as a coach or instructor.) More and more people see it as an opportunity to add Design Thinking or Creative Thinking into their skillset and hope to solve corporate problems, create a new product, or challenge their existing thinking framework.

As a person who teach and coach Design Thinking, it’s sweet and bitter for me to see how this got overused and misused, especially on LinkedIn. For example, people who took one class and would label himself/herself as Design Thinker.

An excerpt from a free PDF “What is Design Thinking” we made

Design Thinking is actually just a systematic “problem-solving” process that all product designers use. (The creation of a product stems from solving user’s needs.) When I was in school, Art Center College of Design, I never had a class called “Design Thinking” with all the lecture and case studies. (The only class with the most lecture was a research class where we learned the techniques of interviewing people.) We just had design project studio every term. In every project, we practiced this process, faced lots of difficulties throughout the project, and learned how to solve them. And that’s what Design Thinking is about - learning by doing.

Design is doing, not just thinking. If you never execute it, then idea stays as an idea. It won’t be created. You don’t learn cooking by watching YouTube videos if you never try to cook by yourself. Design Thinking is the same thing. You have to try to execute your ideas (aka prototyping), understand the complexity your proposed solutions, face the difficulties and try to solve again when it doesn’t work out. Design Thinking doesn’t just stop at the brainstorming phase.

Learn more about the basic of Design thinking: download the FREE PDF here.

[INTERVIEW] The story of starting Bonta artisan gelato in Bend, Oregon

When I just moved to Bend in 2019, my bf (now my husband, Jeremy) bought me some gelato and I was amazed. I've been the loyal customer of Bonta artisan gelato since then... However, their original signage was very confusing…

Bonta original signage before 2020 summer

Jeremy encouraged me to reach out to them to redesign the sign. I didn’t want to strike others as an arrogant designer bitching about their design so I didn’t do it. After a while when we decided we’ll move to Salt Lake City eventually, I finally contacted them and offered redraw the board for free gelato.

The challenge is fitting all the information in the limited space. After I hung it up, I asked if I can volunteer redo the board underneath (“Please order here”).

I can’t tell you how much gelato I had been eaten during that time. When my friends came visiting me, I also took them to this store. Emily got addicted to it and she actually gained weight in those two weeks climbing trip…

I actually never met the owner until this interview. Jeff is a quite laidback person with entrepreneur mind.

In 2006, they sold their house and did backpacking around the world for a year. And they fell in love with gelato. They had been wanting to start a business and at that time there was no artisan ice cream in Bend, Oregon. “Bend needed it at that time”, Jeff said. So they studied gelato with gelato master in LA, and his wife Julie went back east to study with gelato mastro learn how to make gelato. 

I asked how they know if the idea would work. Jeff replied “we didn’t. you have to take a risk.”

They started from their garage, and selling small scale in farmer’s market when they both had a full time job. Ice cream/gelato is actually a hard and costly business to start - there are lots of rules and regulations. The commercial kitchen they built in their garage was 100k. They finally opened their first shop in 2015. Even after years of operating, there are still so many challenges every day…

Now Bonta is growing a lot and expanding. For most of the people, it’s a chance to expand to other towns/cities. Jeff is very cautious about expanding too fast with the price of quality of the product and life. “If it’s mass production, it will no longer be artisan.” And for him, owning a business is having more flexibility and freedom- “Family first”. I have a lot of respect to this - knowing what you want in your life, what makes you happy and what’s enough.