Kissaten
A business sitting on a gold mine with no way for anyone outside the door to know it. The work was turning existing value into demand — and then into revenue, not just reach.
I came in through a mutual friend. The brief was narrow: reactivate an abandoned Instagram account and get back to publishing audiovisual content.
It took about a week to see that this was not a sprint. Kissaten is a specialty coffee and brunch business on Calle Menorca 5, half a block from El Retiro. The founder, Luis Ángel, is a multiple Spanish latte-art champion who draws in coffee at a level most people have never seen in person.
Everything a customer would want was already there. None of it was visible to anyone who had not already walked in.
Reactivate. Daily short-form audiovisual content to bring a dead account back and give the brand a face.
Humanise. Put Luis Ángel in it. His personality and his expertise were the most distinctive assets the business owned and they were invisible online.
Experiment, then commit. Humour, education, graphics, product, audiovisual — and let the response decide what survived.
The uncomfortable finding: humour travelled furthest, and reach alone sells nothing. So I used the attention the humour and personality earned and aimed it back at the business. Abecedario del Ángel del Café was built for exactly that — his nickname, one letter at a time, each tied to a specialty coffee concept, so the format that got the reach was also the format that taught people what the shop does. Alongside it, brunch and product content pointed at the things that actually take money, and educational coffee content around Kissaten Academy Coffee.
- Content strategy, publishing, recording, editing, captions and graphic content
- Instagram, end to end
- Google Business Profile as a managed local-discovery channel
- Partnerships and sponsor outreach
- Event strategy and event execution
- Customer-facing communication for the move from sushi + coffee to specialty coffee + brunch
Retiro is a competitive block and it has become more competitive since we started. Google Business Profile was treated as a channel, not an afterthought.
Profile interactions
Requests for directions
Website clicks
Google rating
Google Business Profile, against the previous comparable period. The business recorded these figures during the engagement. Digital activity coincided with them; I am not claiming any single activity caused them.
The evidence I trust most was not in a dashboard. Customers started arriving and ordering dishes they had seen on Instagram. They talked to Luis Ángel about his videos. At coffee fairs, people in the industry recognised Kissaten and complimented the shop on its digital work.
And the content brought me clients of my own — which is how two of the other projects on this site started.
We built the business its own barista competition, run around the anniversary: 15–20 competing baristas and a five-person professional jury from the coffee industry.
The first edition was financed largely by Kissaten — coffee, milk, coordination, prizes, execution, everything but the machinery.
For the second, I built the sponsorship side: direct outreach to marketing and operations contacts at coffee-industry companies, turning professional relationships into event support. Curador, La Colmena Reina, Nobel and Dalla Corte were involved — some with product, some also contributing financially towards prizes and running costs. Dalla Corte and Nobel already supplied Kissaten through Luis Ángel; what I developed was the sponsorship around the event, not the supplier relationship underneath it.
Outreach, planning, audiovisual material, communication, partnerships, coordination and execution were mine.
The engagement is ongoing and the level of autonomy has moved with it: external marketing approaches to the business now get run past me before they are accepted.
On the rebrand, one precision. The visual side of the sushi-to-specialty transition evolved empirically, because there was no budget for a dedicated graphic or interior designer. I worked on logo adaptation, typography, colour, menus and the communication around the new positioning. The space has since been renovated and reads far more clearly as a specialty coffee business. It is not a formally coherent identity system across every touchpoint and I would not describe it as one.
The content operation is live.
Rather than show screenshots of work that is still being published, here is the account itself.
The achievement is not that an Instagram account grew. It is that I worked out attention was only worth having if it connected to the business, and built the strategy around the commercial opportunity rather than the metric.
Diagnosis, content, local discovery, community, events, partnerships, and the judgement to keep pointing all of it at the till.
Have a digital project
that needs someone to own it?
Tell me what you are trying to build, fix or figure out. I reply to every enquiry, usually within two working days.