Product Design

Designing for Coffee Tradition

Kaltuma Mohamed

April 9, 2024

It is not often you hear someone talk about coffee with so much verve and passion. Sure, any coffee drinker will be all too happy to mention their favorite brew, and fewer still may insist on getting the blends imported from some far-flung exotic locale, but Michael J.A. Davis has opened up a different approach to coffee and stands as a beacon of inspiration for those who want to carve a different path and find the courage to bet on oneself that goes beyond the scope of your run-of-the-mill coffee aficionado. Birthed out of a need to provide the feeling of rest, moments of self-worth, and self-care, for both individuals and communities, whilst all maintaining tradition, Davis began Tinycup. Davis studied Business Management and Marketing & Design at George Mason University and took up a career that intersected equity and design and which landed him a lucrative design opportunity at a financial-technology corporation where he wanted to challenge himself and prove to himself that he was a worthy designer.

Michael J.A Davis, Tinycup Founder & Roaster

In corporate, Davis built a program to help the design organization re-examine their standards and practices, the associate experiences, and prioritize equity and inclusivity. He wanted to know: What do we need to interrogate about company culture and products and services in relation to design equity? What do we need to create, dismantle, and evolve across our associate experiences, across our customer experiences, and our practices, in research, design, product, and tech? And then, finally, what do we need to create, dismantle, and evolve at an institutional level, and at an organizational level, and at an individual level in order to get to this place?

“That was the manifesto or the scope of the work that I had built with Equity by Design, and I ran it for two years. And it was successful by any measure of true success, not just by vanity metrics or popularity that they were looking for. And that led to a lot of recognition. But when we get to the turn of 2022–2023, the economy changes, elections start to become a topic of conversation, and the questions start to become more around the bottom line. How do we prove that this diversity stuff works? That really created a lot of tension on the program to prove that what we know to be right and what there's a lot of evidence for, empirical evidence, experiential knowledge and evidence for among our customers, particularly black and brown ones, wasn't enough for them.”

And so, for Davis, this created a pinch whereby they were just wiping out programs left and right—including his program, which was defunded significantly—and it simply did not leave a lot of room for him to remain there. Recognizing that the folks who he hired and mentored were capable of successfully driving the work, Davis left. When he left corporate, he wanted to find something that he could do in order to not return back.

“I left in a really painful kind of state. But I think a lot like how a lot of us were feeling in 2021. I was in a vulnerable place. And when you're in this place, you tend to reach for those things that are most familiar to you. You're reaching for safety. You're reaching for reassurance. For me, that was my faith. That was the practices and rituals around rest that I had learned over the years and returning back to things that reminded me of that, such as moments with my mother drinking coffee, where she was reliving her experiences with her father, who introduced her to coffee." And so began Tinycup.

Tinycup Coffee

Davis had been roasting coffee for the last ten years; it started through his experience with the East African community. He was introduced to Somali chai through their community in northern Virginia. On a weekly basis, the community would gather together, and they would indulge in the simple pleasure of drinking chai. In a strip mall in northern Virginia, a line of East African shops were conspicuously present. At nighttime, the Ethiopian side turns into a social gathering. On the rear, where the dumpsters and parking lot are situated, there's a woman who runs a small clothing shop and who would serve coffee and food, including desserts. Davis would go there and eat and drink, and it is here that he witnessed the Ethiopian coffee ceremony.

Davis roasting beans at home in traditional Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony

Fascinated, Davis watched on with fervent curiosity. This was not the way he understood coffee; it was not the way coffee was experienced among typical American coffee culture. No, this was something that verged on the transcendental.

“I just understood intuitively,” Davis remarks. “Like, this is something that wasn't just isolated to her; it's not singular. This is part of a larger tradition. Like a science, I did my research and continued to study their methods, and I made connections to my own family. My in-laws are from the Dominican Republic, and my mother-in-law would teach me about the ways that she grew up on the coffee farm and how they would roast coffee and how they would prepare it, so I started to roast for myself at home, and it became kind of a ritual practice of restoration and rest and resistance to what I was feeling in corporate and what I would do on the weekends when I was tired, stressed, so that's what I am aiming to share with the world”.

TinyCup Launch bean selection

Tinycup aims to build. It incorporates some of the elements of coffee heritage and upholding and maintaining that, but also elevating the voices of those who are the inheritors of that tradition. Davis has plans to tell those stories as part of a collective voice through digital spaces while coffee serves as a binding dialect. He has plans to disrupt the coffee industry because there are so few that are trying to build and scale traditional pan roasting, since it's just not the most lucrative way to make coffee.

“It's done in the pan the way that we experienced it when we went home to the Dominican Republic. It's done in the pan the way I learned it from Ethiopian aunties here in our community. Figuring out how to scale that is really hard. But it's really important to me to maintain that tradition and to share that experience with people”.

Davis roasting Tinycup beans at home

Davis was really excited to get back to being artistic and visually creative when it came to creating Tinycup branding. He admits that he spends a lot of time in the creative aspect of the brand and that that can often steer him away from strategy and operations. Designing for Tinycup, Davis aimed to craft an experience that he wants consumers to have with coffee. When designing the logo, for instance, it was easy for him to put his ideas to paper and then onto designing software. Just as he strives to take coffee roasting back to its most simplistic form, branding for Tinycup was natural and came quickly. He reached out to friends, family, and supporters for feedback, conducting a side-of-desk usability test and getting some mixed results but ultimately falling back on his inspirations, trusting his process—put simply: what he liked. Throughout this process, Davis’s focus was always How can I elevate the stories of tradition? Davis was not prepared for how much TinyCup would resonate with people. At launch, the orders came in swiftly, and it became apparent that designing to create this experience, especially serving it to consumers in large quantities, would pose a challenge. At Tinycup, traditional industrial machine roasting is not the norm.

Davis hand-packaging Tinycup coffee

“The question in my mind became how do we scale without compromising any parts of the tradition? I thought for a while that what I wanted to do was just keep it very small-scale so that way I could have control over how this product is manufactured and how it's experienced. But I've run up against a lot of realities in that regard. There are certain things that are just going to be out of my control the more people experience it. I want to take the least invasive approach possible. Is there a way to fulfill a large number of orders while maintaining tradition? Can I afford to hire additional roasters? So on and so forth. But if you come to my house, I'm going to roast it in the pan directly for you and we're drinking it together, and that's how it ought to be done.”

To Davis, Tinycup is an antidote to mainstream American coffee culture that emphasizes speed, quantity, function and routines. Tinycup aims to enrich the coffee-drinking experience by rooting it in a desire to contribute to the preservation and elevation of the traditions and stories of indigenous coffee communities around the globe. Davis has adopted and developed principles of design and justice work to guide his approach to traditional coffee roasting. Small and mighty by design, Davis hopes to become influential in the effort to center equity in the coffee industry.

To learn more, visit TinyCup.

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