Scaling Coffee Culture & Building Hospitality Brands
After two years in Seattle, I was missing the Midwest. I had outgrown the city, missed home, and wanted to be closer to family. So I moved to Chicago, the third largest city in the country and the ultimate spot for food, culture, and coffee.
Moving meant starting over and rebuilding my career network from the ground up. To make ends meet, I took on various freelance social media projects and built small partnerships through my own channels. During that season of hustle, I set up a social media collaboration with Dollop Coffee Company. While filming inside one of their cafes, I met their social media manager and told her about the work I was doing. That same night, I tracked down the owner’s contact info, emailed him directly, and asked to sit down for coffee.
He brought me on full-time, on the spot, as Head of Marketing across all 25 Dollop locations and its sister brands, including Wormhole Coffee, Dollop Diner, New Wave, Halfwit Coffee Roasters, Passion House, and Hoosier Mama.
Over the next year and a half at Dollop, we completely shifted how our brands showed up in the community:
Experiential Events: Concepted and hosted "coffee shop raves" that blew up online, resulting in lines wrapped around the block.
Hyper-Local Retail Overhaul: A total turnover of our retail stock across every store. We cut out mass distributors like Sysco and replaced them with curated goods from small, local businesses, then turned those partnerships into co-branded social campaigns and tasting pop-ups. I eventually scaled this same hyper-local model into other local Chicago businesses.
Regional Expansion: Led the marketing, menu design, creative direction, and launch strategy to bring Dollop inside 60 Sprouts Farmers Market locations across the Midwest.
Six months into my time at Dollop, the owner came to the social media manager and me with an idea: launch our own agency. We co-founded Midst Marketing to bring that same scalable, high-impact marketing to independent cafes and hospitality groups across Illinois. We’ve built campaigns for several regional chains, most recently leading the strategy, branding, and full rollout for Aviator Coffee kiosks and full-service locations inside 4 Lindy’s Travel Centers.