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Design Better
Marco Suarez: From designer to coffee entrepreneur ☕
00:49:32
We speak with Marco about the story of his transition from design to coffee entrepreneurship, how it felt to leave the world of tech, and how he applied his design skills to starting a business.
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Transcript50 lines
- [00:02]
Marco Suarez
Branding and being a product focused business is form and function. You know, you want to create something that has good functionality, that works well, but that is aesthetically pleasing. You know something you enjoy its presence.
- [00:20]
Eli Woolery
It's a tough job market out there right now for designers and other creative technologists. Many of us are wondering if there are other ways we might be able to use our skills, and some of us are considering an entrepreneurial path.
- [00:30]
Aaron Walter
Our guest today has done just that. Marco Suarez has had an impressive career in design, but he took an interesting turn into entrepreneurship. Marco started his career as a graphic designer. He became an art director at mailchimp, where I had the pleasure of working with him. He was a product designer at Etsy and the design systems lead at Envision, where both Eli and I worked with him.
- [00:53]
Eli Woolery
But in addition to design, Marco also has another passion, coffee. In 2015, he started Methodical Coffee in Greenville, South Carolina. In 2019, Marco left his full time role in tech to focus on the business and now Methodical has three cafes in Greenville and ships coffee across the United States. We also partner with Methodical on our.
- [01:12]
Aaron Walter
Own Design Better Coffee, which I'm enjoying right now, by the way. We speak with Marco about the story of his transition from design to coffee entrepreneurship, how it felt to leave the world of tech, and how he applied his design skills to starting a new business. Today, we're also announcing something special. In addition to the coffee that we collaborate with methodical on, DesignBetter now has a tea. It's crafted for clarity, calm and creative flow. This loose leaf blend balances bright citrus, soothing herbs and a gentle spice that lingers like a good idea. Head over to DBTR Co Tea, use the code designbettertea and get 15% off your order. And if you're one of the first five people to leave us a review on Methodical's site. After buying the tee, we will send you a free Design Better mug.
- [02:06]
Eli Woolery
This is DesignBetter, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.
- [02:12]
Aaron Walter
And I'm Aaron Walter. At DesignBetter, our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a Premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com Subscribe. Marco Suarez, it's a delight to have you on DesignBetter.
- [02:43]
Marco Suarez
Thanks. Thanks for having me.
- [02:44]
Aaron Walter
Marco, you and I have known each other for a long time because we have worked together on multiple occasions, which is cool. And we also live not too far apart. You live in Greenville, South Carolina. I'm in Athens, Georgia. It's about a two hour drive. Greenville's a wonderful city and want to talk about that a little bit. But what's I think particularly interesting about you and your career is that you have a background in design and tech. You and I worked together at Mailchimp. You worked at Etsy for a long time. You worked at Envision with both me and Eli. And you have this focus, this focus in design on design systems. And yet today you co founded and you run a very successful coffee company called Methodical. Anyone who's been listening to the show for a while will recognize Methodical is a partner of ours, has been a sponsor for a long time. Methodical makes the design better coffee, which many of our listeners enjoy, including me every day. Let's just start with your earlier education and how you found your way into design.
- [03:49]
Marco Suarez
Yeah, art has been a part of my life since as long as I can remember. When I was very little, I remember asking my older sister to draw pictures for me so I could watch her draw to learn how to draw. But that was kind of a big piece of my identity for elementary school, middle school, high school. I just kind of absorbed myself in the creative arts, learned to play the guitar. That was also music was a big part. And when I got into college, like most kids, I feel like there's a lack of knowing what to do, you know, with my career and my life. And I had a friend tell me one day, he's like, have you considered graphic design? And I had no clue what that even was. And so I looked into it and realized, wow, I could do creative visual things and get a paycheck. Which, of course, my parents were pressuring me away from the arts in a sense, you know, toward the sciences or something that's a little bit more standard and predictable. And so this seemed to be a good compromise. It took a while to kind of orient myself of what graphic design was, but completely fell in love with typography and composition and how you can use graphic design as a medium for art and did a lot of kind of, you know, collages. I was real inspired by, you know, the Ray Gun magazine and that kind of gritty collage type of graphic design, while at the same time pursuing just a job and, you know, service design and was very, I don't know, taking my opportunities as they came to me. It's funny how, especially in the late 90s, early 2000s, the Internet existed, but it wasn't anything that it was today. So finding opportunities and knowing what was out there was more difficult. And I've always kind of lived in smaller towns, markets, so there wasn't, you know, as much exposure to what was out there in the world. But I just feel very fortunate and lucky that I was given opportunities or people that crossed my path. Like that one friend who was like, hey, have you thought about this or have you looked into that? And then that just kind of led to one thing after another. But it's funny how never in a million years would I have considered myself falling in love with something like typography. But still to this day I love geeking out over, you know, the layout of a book or just like a well chosen typeface or something. But it all kind of started more of just drawing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Wolverine and all the stuff that kids, you know, love to draw.
- [06:35]
Eli Woolery
So I'm guessing your first job out of school was more centered on graphic design. Maybe tell us a little bit about that. And then your evolution from working on more graphic design projects to more technical projects and eventually design systems.
- [06:49]
Marco Suarez
Yeah, my first job out of college was where I had interned in college, which was a small B2B marketing agency here in Greenville, South Carolina and was very graphic design, laying out catalogs. I was a production designer. So I was low in the totem pole and I was doing music and the visual arts on the side and slowly started to kind of get more interested in web design. Started learning a program, Dreamweaver, how to use it. I left that job and moved more into web design and worked with a person here in town to just do small marketing websites for local companies. And then there was a co working facility here in Greenville. At the time it was called Cowork, it's now called Atlas Local. And it was a group of freelancers that were just more advanced and in tune with what was going on in the industry than I was. And so I met some people there and joined. And this was when I had kind of gone on my own doing freelance. I was attempting to do that. And this was a marketing move for me too, because a lot of the people there would outsource work to each other, so. So if someone's too busy, they would give some work to someone else and that kind of thing. And became really close with all the people there, became a tight group of friends. And that's really where I got exposed to what was going on in tech. This was shortly after the iPhone launched and the app Store and people were just trying to figure out what in the world to do with this app Store, what was possible. And that is then where I got involved with a startup based in San Francisco called Zarli. And it was a crazy idea, a buyer powered marketplace where you would post what you wanted and how much you wanted to pay for and when you wanted it, and then people would fulfill it. That's where I got really hooked into tech. And I really didn't know what was happening. I didn't know that I was leaving the service design world and moving in more into the product design world. And I still live here in Greenville. Go out to Saint a friend about every six weeks and we would in the evenings hang out with designers from Twitter, from Facebook, just kind of connect network with different people. It was very electric. It was when Silicon Valley, that San Francisco tech startup was just on fire and just very, very interesting. And that's kind of where also I kind of got a taste for specialty coffee. Our office was right across the street from Blue Bottle. I would drink as much Blue Bottle as I could as my body would allow me to every day. That's kind of where I started to understand like, not only do I enjoy this type of design better working in house on a product, I just fell in love with the tech community and the tech scene and the conferences and the community was just amazing. Found a lot of really close, good friends during those times.
- [09:49]
Aaron Walter
And it was around 2013, I think, when you joined Mailchimp.
- [09:55]
Marco Suarez
Yeah.
- [09:55]
Aaron Walter
And we were, I can't remember how big we were, maybe 120ish people, 130ish people. Design team was still smallish. Maybe we were 18, 20 or something like that. And you came in with a focus on design systems, I think, and mobile design in particular. Could you maybe talk about what that was like coming into a place like this where it's sort of like it's a startup that is a little bit further along maybe than Xarli was. So you see a different stage and you see maybe different creative processes.
- [10:32]
Marco Suarez
Yeah. Where Xarli was the TV show Silicon Valley in real life, mailchimp was a lot more mature and it was for me to say, an incredible opportunity. My experience with design systems, once again, I didn't really know that term. It was one of those things I kind of fell into of this seems like a very smart way to build an app where you're building things by components, where you can test everything to make sure that it is visually the way you want it and then just reuse it throughout the app as you need it, which we had done at Xarly, had done that with a couple engineers. We had built that out and it was amazing. And so, yeah, that's kind of what started my interest in systems design. And you're right, at mailchimp, the mobile design was also where I found a lot of opportunity. And this was a more mature environment with a team that was making money and was a profitable business. It was in growth phase and then trying to also understand, which I think was one of the greatest things I learned at mailchimp was around branding. The mailchimp brand was such a unique brand that was even at that point very well known, especially in the tech community and a company that's very well respected and just learning how brands were personalities. At least that's how mailchimp approached it, more so than a set of standards, which was really, really fascinating. And even how mailchimp expressed itself in a way where it was not about the ROI on a particular ad or message. It was more so about this slow, long tail method of building relationships with its customers over time and investing in goodwill in the community and how that actually grew the company and how it did bring a return was also, again from my experience, just a unconventional approach that still to this day, I reference a lot of the things I learned when I was at mailchimp.
- [12:37]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, that was definitely an educational experience for me as well. And I feel a little bit bummed that some of those lessons might be fading away a little bit, where folks may not remember some of the things that were uncovered from that experience. But I feel like maybe at that time as well, you were experimenting with other businesses as well. Isn't that right? I mean, you've always sort of had this entrepreneurial spirit. There's like, I'm going to work and I'm working on this stuff and it's fun and interesting, but I'm also curious about other things.
- [13:11]
Marco Suarez
Yeah, definitely. I've always had that kind of entrepreneurial desire to create something of my own. More so of like seeing these businesses, Zarlie, mailchimp, other startups that were just like popping up like crazy. And it's like, man, I want to also participate in that and benefit from the electricity and the excitement in the air from starting your own business. And a lot of the ideas I would bounce off my wife were both a brick and mortar physical business or be some type of digital app. And there were several things that I tried and kind of got off the Ground. Me and a friend put together a website that was kind of a curation of Etsy, but for men. So we would curate clothing and home goods and stuff that were more masculine into this website and if people would shop it and they would just be redirected to Etsy to buy it. So as a curation tool, some of the ideas were terrible. And you know, as most as a lot of time, people who are entrepreneurial, they're just fishing and hoping that they catch something. This is definitely where the concept for a coffee business. When we were living in Atlanta, my family, my wife's family lives here in Greenville. We would come visit family and friends and there wasn't really especially a coffee shop in downtown Greenville. You know, I experienced Blue Bottle in San Francisco and Octane in Atlanta. There wasn't anything like that in Greenville. And that was one of those, like, man, this would be a cool idea. I love coffee and I love the idea of doing something physical and in person. More so than digital. There's a lot of things that kind of caused me to focus in on a coffee business while we were living in Atlanta.
- [14:57]
Eli Woolery
Margaret, I'm sure a lot of our audience right now, you know, it's a very challenging time in tech and people who already have a side hustle might be thinking, hey, maybe it's time to invest more in this in such a way that can transition over or maybe they're looking for something to transition into. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your own mindset as you thought about going towards the coffee business more full time and then also how your skills as a designer helped you there and where there were gaps.
- [15:25]
Marco Suarez
I definitely was not looking for an out of tech at the time, especially when I was at mailchimp. And even after I left there, moved to Etsy, I was still very invested in building my career as a digital product designer. Still loved it. But after Methodical started, I started to fall in love with it too. And I remember having kind of conversations with myself that at some point on someday I'm going to have to choose one or the other. It's too much to do both. I had two young daughters, had a full time job running a small company, small coffee company with my two business partners and had a family. And it was just a lot. And I like to work hard, I like to hustle. So it was enjoyable. But it was also like, I can't do this forever. But the transition really happened more around. It was an intentional decision and it was, do I move forward with continuing my career? In tech. And a lot happened between mailchimp and kind of where I ended up when I made this decision. But I was starting to kind of get burnt out. You know, tech moves very quickly. A year in tech is like three years in other industries where it moves so rapidly. There's so much change, there's so much to learn and keep on top of that. At some point you just kind of like, I'm just kind of getting tired of this, I think very much into the future. And I'm like, you know, trying to see right, where's my path going, what are the possibilities? Where is this coffee business going and what is its possibilities? And finally just made the decision, all right, I need to start creating a strategy for my exit out of my tech career and into coffee. And to be honest, that was a very, very. I mean, even to this day, I still struggle with whether or not I made the right decision. It's a lot easier to build a profitable, high valued business in tech. You don't have the same constraints as you do in a physical business, especially one that deals in agriculture like a coffee business. It's a lot harder to build value there. So the money you can make in tech is a lot greater and frankly easier than you can in other industries. I knew I was choosing a more difficult path. I don't know how things would have been different if I had made a different decision today. The landscape is very different in tech and a lot of friends are struggling to find work and it is a tougher market, especially for designers. But it was still a very difficult decision that I wrestled with for years of whether or not this was a smart move for myself, for my family, you know, all that kind of stuff.
- [18:08]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, there's different calculations for this. There's calculations of like annual salary and the lifestyle that I and my family aspire to have. But there's a big tax, an emotional and mental tax of working in a large corporation like a tech company where there is absolute certainty today and tomorrow. That was the stupidest idea ever. Actually, we're going in this other direction. The rug is pulled out under your feet so many times it's really kind of hard to tell where the ground is anymore. And you just sort of have to develop this balancing act to that. I wonder how you think about or how you remember those times at mailchimp or Etsy or envision even, you know, you found this focus that was valuable with design systems and you were doing a lot of stuff that was valuable. But I also know that there were times where things got totally upended, where, like, teams would get cut, reorged, your mission got changed totally. And that can be disorienting and frustrating, especially when you are a creative person. You can't help but put your heart into everything you're doing. And then all of a sudden it just got yanked out from underneath you. That's that world in tech, goods and bads. And then you're the CEO of your company. If there's an idea that you have, you can do it, but you also have to deal with all of the challenges that bubble up. How do you think about those two experiences and not necessarily what's better, but what feels right for you?
- [19:52]
Marco Suarez
That's a fantastic observation. When I was working at Etsy and slowly getting into design systems more as a career than just a, like, hey, every company should do this. I'll help out. Like, I enjoy this. I was advocating for it very hard. At Etsy, we had a working group that was around design systems, and then a team was formed around it and I was put on that team. And it was immediately like, we have to prove our value. Because design systems is not something that directly affects the bottom line. It's not a revenue generator. It is an efficiency. And so you are trying to advocate for your existence on a regular basis by proving that you can create efficiencies, optimizations, you can scale design within a company, within a team. And so we were on just, I feel like the best path with a great team doing good work. It was working. And then Etsy got flipped upside down. The activist shareholder came in, bought up some stock and made a fuss, and the company was kind of plateauing and was undervalued and was at risk. And so there was kind of a push for it to be acquired. Thankfully, it didn't happen. They were able to navigate that, but the whole leadership team got booted, ton of layoffs, and the design systems team got dissolved. And so I was kind of left floating because I cared very deeply about this subject matter and what it could do for a company I really believed in, and I wanted to continue doing that. And I just hit burnout in a significant way. And that's when I decided to leave there, but to continue pursuing design systems. And that's kind of that heart that I feel like you're speaking to. Aaron, where especially for me, I have, like, whatever I see as the ideal or I see a vision for, I want to do everything I can in order to realize it. So if that means leaving a company, I'm going to do that to pursue it somewhere else and to, you know, try to climb that mountain. Now transitioning to being an owner of a business, I don't have anyone to convince in a way other than my business partners. I can realize my own ideas. But now it's the harsh reality of, like, business. Like, is this idea going to generate revenue? Is this idea going to, like, put us at risk? The weight is heavier. At the same time, the challenge is, you know, you're going from trying to climb smaller mountains to climbing bigger mountains is they're riskier, they're harder, take more effort, but the reward is potentially greater. So I actually have those experiences in all these different companies of trying to advocate for certain things and push for what I believe was a good move for the company, you know, now is very different. The risks are higher, but hopefully the reward is, too.
- [22:53]
Aaron Walter
We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. Foreign it's time for a coffee break with our friends over at Methodical Coffee. Hey, Will, how are you?
- [23:07]
D
Hey. I'm doing fantastic.
- [23:09]
Aaron Walter
Will Schurz, co founder of Methodical and Master Roaster so everybody wants the best cup of coffee, especially in the middle of a busy workday. How should we think about coffee roasts and how to select the right flavor profile for us?
- [23:25]
D
Yes, you know, classically, everybody is prone to thinking light, medium or dark roast coffee. And I have been, too. But over the past few years, I've kind of been on this journey of thinking about coffee more so as its flavor profile. And I want all coffee to have sweetness, whether it's roasted lightly or more dark. And so I think it's fun to be able to free your mind and experience the full spectrum of coffee. You get to your coffee break and instead of saying, all right, do I want light roast coffee or a dark roast coffee, Maybe you can start saying, do I want to taste a coffee that has more fruit forward, complex, esoteric characteristics, or do I want to have something just an easy drinker, maybe a little bit more roasty, a little darker, a little bit more of like a toasted profile? And so there's this way to think about coffee now that I am constantly and currently going through this, where I'm starting to try to think about coffee as what is the more holistic flavor of the coffee. I used to tell myself I didn't like dark roast. And I think what I found out is it wasn't that I didn't like dark roast coffee, it's that I didn't like the lack of sweetness in a coffee that was roasted dark. So at Methodical, if you go to our website, we have the full spectrum of coffees from light fruit forward to a little more traditionally dark roasted coffee. And we categorize them for ease of flavor profile. You know, you'll see avant garde, contemporary, and classic offerings. And so I don't mean to talk so much to make things more complicated, really. I want to simplify things more and say, you know, let's just kind of free ourselves up to think more holistically about coffee roast profiles.
- [25:16]
Aaron Walter
I love that. And people can learn more about methodical coffee@methodicalcoffee.com While you're there, you could check out the special design better roast. It's one of our favorites. That's methodicalcoffee.com learn more about methodical coffee and get some tips on how to brew the best cup ofcoffee@methodicalcoffee.com and now back to the show.
- [25:50]
Eli Woolery
Marco, you touched briefly on what you learned about building a brand from mailchimp, and we'll circle back to that because both Aaron and I love the methodical brand. But before we get there, I'm curious. So coming into this business, you always had your design skills, and I'm assuming you applied those to the branding, the visual part of the branding. But where were there gaps in your skills? And how did you identify the right partners to bring in?
- [26:15]
Marco Suarez
Self awareness is one of the greatest things that I feel like any professional or any human, the most valuable thing they can learn. I remember not too long after we opened, we were doing something, and I was just kind of calculating in my head, okay, like, I chose to do this for X reasons, and it was a customer experience thing. And I was like, where's the return on this gonna look like? And I started kind of doing the math in my head and realizing, oh, we're gonna lose money on this idea. And this has been like, I have no idea how to run a business. I can create a customer experience. I'm very confident in that. I can create a brand. You know, I can create a customer experience that will resonate with people. I have no idea how to operate a business. And that set me down a path of learning everything I could. Reading books, listening to podcasts, reading articles, just, you know, googling certain terms. I didn't really know what meant to give myself a very, very fast kind of MBA. And if you told me that when I was 20 years old, I would have cringed at the idea of, like, I'm going to fall in love with business. And Love listening to these business podcasts and reading business books, but here I am actually like really, really enjoying it. You know, I'm a fan of the like, harsh realities of like, just like hard facts that are sometimes inconven difficult to hear. And one of those is as a designer, I don't necessarily have the experience and the skill set to run a business because I don't really understand business. But in order to achieve the things I want to achieve with my business, I need to shore up these, you know, weaknesses and just understanding business and having some level of business acumen became very important to me to learn and understand and grow in. As far as augmenting with people in our team. There's a great book, e Myth that talks about these kind of three people or three skill sets necessary for running a business. The visionary, the manager, the technician. And people can have one of those and some people have two, but no one has all three. And realizing like I'm not especially in this type of industry, I'm not the technician, I am the technician. On more the brand marketing side side, maybe not even marketing, but more brand customer experience. But I'm definitely not in terms of the product that we create. And that's why one of my partners is who he is. He's the technician, he's the, the coffee guy. And we have a CFO that we hired a few years ago because we also just did not have that finance skill set. You know, not the bookkeeping kind of skill set, but more the finance, that strategy kind of skill set. And that has been a huge help to us. But just knowing that there's skill sets that you don't have and some things are acquirable through, you know, just education. Some things though require other people, you know, hiring and knowing your limits and that kind of thing.
- [29:10]
Aaron Walter
How did you think about building the brand for Methodical? It's a great name and that feels like job one has come up with the right name that communicates the values or the steps for like laying out these are the values that we want to communicate. And what are the visual elements for all the online pieces that collateral. But also you've got to design cafes too. How'd you think about all of those different pieces fitting together?
- [29:36]
Marco Suarez
It all started with the realization that I wanted our brand, anything that can be experienced with the senses to speak to the type of experience and product that you're going to be getting. So we chose Name Methodical as a way to, you know, tip our hat of what kind of experience should you be expecting when you come here, we are what's considered a third wave coffee shop, which takes kind of a more elevated position on what coffee is. It focuses more on the terroir of the coffee, the process, the cultivation, all that kind of stuff, and kind of strips out some of the typical things of syrups and additives, making it a little more pure on the coffee itself and the preparation more so than other things. So in order to project that, especially in a town that wasn't familiar with this, I wanted to kind of, you know, be very, very transparent that this is different. And in order to do that, I designed the space to also focus on elevated materials. I wanted a space that felt inspiring, that people wanted to be in. They felt good about being in. A lot of it was just me experiencing things and knowing what I did not want to do and so trying to do the opposite of it. So a space that was not stressful, but a space that was de. Stressing. Inspiring that you kind of wanted your home to feel like. So choosing materials like our bars, Carrera marble. We have walnut accents and brass and not anything like revolutionary. But 10 years ago, for Greenville, that was very different. Our contractor actually said he's like, I haven't put brass in homes since the early 90s. Like, are you sure you want to do that? If you went to. If you're in Atlanta or Seattle or San Fran or New York, that was already on trend. But for Greenville, it was still relatively new. But the brand was all about focusing on communicating the type of experience and what we cared about in terms of, like, this is a place to come sit and consider and think about what you're doing. We had a term of like, you're feeding your body, but you're feeding your mind. You're thinking about what you're drinking, and you're paying attention to the nuance and complexity. We also had a term, humble sophistication, that was around the fact that we wanted to be welcoming. We did not want to be exclusive. We wanted people to feel, no matter who they were, we wanted them to feel welcomed in our space and that this was for anybody. This wasn't for a particular demographic. I tried to create a romance around it. We used Blue Willow mugs, which a lot of people have a connection with through their grandparents. Because it was, you know, very trendy in the 50s. It was also very cheap to acquire back then. Now they are much more trendy and harder to find. But we literally use, like, antique Blue Willow as our cafe mugs still do. It was more work but it was also fun to figure out what is the creative. Not necessarily expensive, just a different way to create something that is going to leave an impression on people.
- [32:40]
Aaron Walter
It definitely comes through with the brand. Especially, like, there's all these handmade, these beautiful drawings and paintings that are on the website. They're on the packaging. It's not something that came out of Figma. It feels like something that came off of, like, beautiful watercolor paper. You know, was there an exercise that you went through as you're sort of, like, creating these brand values and brand elements? Were you creating a mood board? Were you creating, like, some sort of layout with different words and ideas that you then brought to your business partners and you guys worked through together? Take us into that room. What was that like, working through these brand ideas?
- [33:24]
Marco Suarez
A lot of it was trying to tell a story through, like, this is the feeling that I want to create and pulling images to create that feeling. I'm not an interior designer by any means, but I think I do pretty good at, like, seeing things in my mind and being able to see how things relate to each other and whether or not they're going to work. One of the things I honestly kind of stumbled into when we first opened our shop, we did not have any signage anywhere, because I honestly didn't consider that. So nothing's had our name on it, but everyone knew it was us because everything else was unique and unified, wasn't necessarily uniform, but they worked together, and that created that kind of brand experience. And that is an observation I made. Like, okay, I actually like this. I like the fact that we are sourcing things that people may already have an experience with, but we're combining them with other things to kind of, like, create juxtapositions that create a uniqueness that we can own. So with our coffee bags, one aspect I wanted to communicate was you go into a grocery store, look at the coffee shelf, and especially back then, and even today, coffee bags are very graphic, very colorful, but it's like blocks of color, typography, not organic. So I wanted to go against the flow there. Like, all right, let's do something organic. I lot of the elements in our shop were organic. You know, it's woods, it's natural materials. There's a organic naturalness to it. And then I also wanted to create something that people wanted to display on their counter. And the coffee bags that were trending back then, this is like 2016, 2017, and even today, it might not fit the vibe of your kitchen aesthetic. You want to maybe put it in a drawer. And I wanted something that people would want to display and, and be more art forward. And that has been kind of a brand value of ours is art forward and then us, not us, and then some kind of graphic element. I worked with a good friend of mine who's an artist, and she came up with that floral motif. But I knew I wanted it to be something hand drawn, hand done, and just beautiful. And that was kind of the direction I gave her. It's like, just make something, you know, that people want to display on their kitchen counter.
- [35:37]
Aaron Walter
That's super interesting just to interrupt, because I do that. I didn't think about that, but normally I would put coffee in the cabinet and I like to leave it out next to my espresso machine because I like the look of the bags. They're so beautiful.
- [35:52]
Marco Suarez
Branding and being a product focused business is form and function. You know, you want to create something that has good functionality, that works well, but that is aesthetically pleasing. You know, something you enjoy is presence. And all of our shops are designed slightly different. There is a functionality to it and under the hood there's, you know, systems and standards that we're developing. But from an aesthetic perspective, I want them to all be different because they want them to serve the community that they're in and for people to enjoy the aesthetic ness of them. It's important to me in my life and I think regardless if people realize it or not, they desire that too. And so whether it's a bag of coffee or whether it is, you know, one of our shops or something else that we do, one of our T shirts or hats or whatever, I want it to be first and foremost, just aesthetically pleasing. The materials, the way it feels, smells, looks, all that kind of stuff to be as good as we can do, as premium as we can get, and then attach it to us. I want the value of the object of the thing to be great and then us second, not the reverse of that, where the value is us and it's poorly made or doesn't taste great or whatever.
- [37:12]
Eli Woolery
So for folks out there, I'm sure we've got plenty of coffee nerds in the audience that will appreciate all the nuance. But if you're a little earlier in your coffee journey and if you want to learn, maybe you can point us to somewhere that folks that are just newer to coffee can learn. And as a side note, we'll place some of the little mini interview that we did with your partner, Will, about how to choose a roast and how to brew the Perfect cup of coffee in this episode. But yeah, if there's other resources that you have that would be great to.
- [37:38]
Marco Suarez
Share, I would say that as a company, we find our place in that kind of like people who are coffee curious, who are intimidated by coffee, not necessarily coffee nerds or snobs. We want to be that kind of like on ramp into craft coffee. So we have invested a lot of work into our blog, and our YouTube channel is relatively new. We've been producing a lot of videos over the past year around, like, kind of the full spectrum, people who are brand new into it. And also for people who want a little more advanced knowledge and understanding, we have a coffee trainer and she developed a seed to cup class that's very introductory, but goes very deep into kind of an overview of the entire coffee chain. But people buy our coffee and brew at home. The better they are brewing it, the better we look good. You know, it's true. We want to provide people the resources they need to brew coffee well at home. And so between our YouTube channel, our blog, that seed a cup class, I think we've got a lot of good resources that are not talking down to people, not over their heads. Like, it's kind of that on ramp and goes from introductory to more advanced.
- [38:53]
Aaron Walter
I want to talk also about just how you've built your life. You at one point moved to Atlanta and decided maybe that wasn't the right fit. I remember that was kind of a big deal to decide are we going to leave South Carolina and to go to this new place, you end up going back to Greenville, which for listeners who haven't been there, it's a wonderful, wonderful city, much beloved in the Southeast. And I think it's a gem that more people should be aware of. But, you know, choosing to live in a place like Greenville, which is a creative place, has a creative community, having other creative pursuits in your life, like guitar. We often end up talking about guitars a fair bit when we get on calls. But did you have any ideas as a kid growing up or ideas as an adult of the type of life you wanted to build for yourself?
- [39:46]
Marco Suarez
I grew up in Indiana and arrived in Greenville and just kind of fell in love with this area and then, you know, got married, had kids and built a career that was not focused here. You know, working at mailchimp. Mailchimp at the time was kind of the big tech company that was based in the South. That was very unusual. We had considered moving to San Francisco and moving to New York and just kind of came back to like we want to live here. The environment here is a slower life, more laid back. I mean, it's called Greenville, but the weather here is super pleasant and foliage and all that is beautiful. When you're close to the mountains, close to the beach, it's a good location. So we decided like we're just going to figure out how to make it work here. Loved Atlanta. Just the chaos and kind of the hot mess of Atlanta is endearing. And we loved it while we were there and we considered staying, but we just decided that like this market is where we wanted to live our lives. It is easier to have impact in a market the size of Greenville. These kind of markets are I think, really special because they are big enough to where there's something going on. It's a growing city, but it is small enough to where you can have impact and really invest in the community. And, and we've had over the past 10 years, Methodical has kind of. We've gotten to know more and more of like city leaders and the movers and shakers of the city, which I think if we lived in Atlanta or a bigger city, that would be far more difficult. So it's kind of nice to as a creative to be in a city that you kind of feel that you have the ability and the impact to help shape. And it's also a place that we want to raise our kids in kind of the lifestyle that we want to kind of show them. I mean, I love Atlanta, love big cities. That's where I go to sometimes recharge my batteries creatively and then be able to come back here and bring something back and infuse what I'm doing here with something I've learned in a different market.
- [41:45]
Eli Woolery
You mentioned your 10 year anniversary of Methodical Coffee, the founding of it, which is exciting. What's your favorite coffee that you guys roast right now? And maybe there's more than one.
- [41:54]
Marco Suarez
We classify our coffees into three different buckets. We call them classic, contemporary and avant garde. So classic is your more kind of traditional roast profiles a little darker, richer. It's still not as heavy or as bitter as some places, but for us it's darker. Avant garde is the experimental, the funky, a lot of fermentation, weird process techniques. And then the contemporary is that middle of the road kind of more medium roast, balanced, some complexity and fruitiness, but it's still got body to it and serves as your daily drinker. That's my category. It's incredibly inspiring the way coffee producers are getting more involved in processing the experimental things that our producers are doing is mind blowing. And how much that impacts the end flavor and how small tweaks can really, really change the profile of a coffee. But I still like that kind of medium. So our bestseller is a blend called Blue Boy, named after a painting in our shop. And that's one of my favorite blends. You know, back in the early 1900s, it was really popular to have a paint by number, Blue Boy, and then its counterpart, Pinky or Pink Lady. And I bought those as decorations from our shops and that kind of became our mascots. And now I have literally a collection of Blue Boy and Pink lady ephemera from the early 1900s that people just give me. But we also have a coffee. Walter Bautista is the name of the producer and it was one of the first coffees that we bought the entire crop of the producer. And he is a farmer in Honduras. And like a lot of these producers, it's a very small farm. He farms avocados and other things. But every year we buy his entire crop of coffee. And it is phenomenal for being such a small producer. It's a fantastic tasting coffee and it has that kind of middle of the road, medium balance, but it also has a complexity that's really nice. He, you know, relies on us every year for this check and we buy all of his coffee. We've done it for about six years now. Every year. It's just stellar. Love the fact that this is the only place you can get his coffee. And I love the fact that we get to support a producer like that. So I recommend that coffee as well.
- [44:14]
Aaron Walter
That's fantastic. Marco, what have you been watching, listening to, reading that is inspiring or maybe has you looking at things differently these days.
- [44:24]
Marco Suarez
In 2021, we took our kids to Disney for the first time and I enjoyed it way more than they did. More so from the customer experience perspective, just being blown away. And. And so when I got home, I like bought every book I could. I have a Walt Disney biography that I read. And then like, I've got a handful of books about Disney operations and how they do customer service and kind of the strategy of the business. And it is fascinating and it's just crazy to me how, you know, this person who just was an animator before this industry even existed, and then created, you know, this massive, massive business that has such a high standard for customer experience and can execute at a crazy level. Like 40, 50,000 people at each park every day, yet everything is pristine and perfect. And the way they train their staff from a customer experience perspective it's like the pinnacle. So I'm just absorbing and learning everything I can and trying to figure out how to apply that to a small coffee business.
- [45:23]
Eli Woolery
So before we let you go, Marco, we have a little announcement to make here. And you all don't just do coffee. You do teas as well. And we're partnering with you on a new design, Better tea. I really love it. It's got these notes of citrus and spice, and it with the ingredients like lemongrass, turmeric root, it feels like something that this time of year, everybody's got a cold. And it feels really healthy to have a mug of this in your hand. The one ingredient I wasn't as familiar with is Mao Feng. If I pronounce it right, the tea leaf. Could you tell us a little bit about that particular particular tea?
- [45:56]
Marco Suarez
Yeah. Mouthing is a green tea. It has this buttery, fresh flavor profile and is one of our favorite teas as a company. A lot of our employees absolutely love that tea. Cheap blends are really interesting because you can like coffee. You're creating blends up with just coffee tea. You can really use anything. And you create these, like, tea blends with a lot of things that aren't tea. Like this one particular has, like, you were mentioning, like, lemongrass and turmeric and mint, ginger, all kinds of things. And it's sometimes harder to create a flavor profile that feels complete and, like, not just a mix of a bunch of things, but it feels like a profile. But this one, I think, kind of nails that, where it has that warmth to it, but with brightness. Being a musician, I think in terms of, like, flavor, kind of like a music eq, like, you don't want music that's all bass and no treble or like all mids or whatever. And so you want it the EQ nicely. So this T has that nice EQ of it has the body, has that bass, but also has the brightness, the kind of sharpness with that treble. So, yeah, I think it's a. It's a great tea, and I'm excited to release it to all your listeners and viewers.
- [47:09]
Aaron Walter
So where can people learn more about methodical. We should also mention methodical subscriptions. I'm a longtime subscriber. I get methodical coffee in the mail regularly. Where can people learn more about that?
- [47:21]
Marco Suarez
So our website, methodicalcoffee.com we have a wide array of coffees that for whichever you prefer, the bolder or brighter, we do teas and teas are. We approach the same way. We have a really Great breakfast, black tea, peppermint. We have some really great blends of chamomile blend called Meadows that is caffeine free and you know, has chamomile so it has this little more of a relaxing evening tea. We're also getting more and more into physical goods. We're Starting to develop 100% from scratch our own products. So our T shirts or hats, we have a beanie that is 100% designed, produced by us for us. And then like you mentioned, coffee subscriptions. We work with a company called Bottomless that has a really cool technology where they send you a scale and you put your coffee bag and it's free. You put your coffee bag on the scale and it is a Bluetooth enabled and as soon as you get low it triggers your next order. So it's not like a time based subscription, which we do those as well. But a time based subscription is no matter what, on this date you'll get coffee right at your door. But the scale is nice because it only triggers an order when you need it. So you don't run out of coffee or have too much, that kind of thing. And then if you're in the Southeast, come visit us in Greenville. We have three shops here and we're under construction with one in Columbia, South Carolina. So come visit us as well.
- [48:42]
Aaron Walter
Fantastic. Well, Marco, what a pleasure to have you on the show today.
- [48:45]
Marco Suarez
Thanks y'all for having me. This is a great conversation.
- [48:52]
Aaron Walter
This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel designbetterpodcast.com It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.