kaffemik

Some friends and I run a tiny coffee shop in Vienna that we opened in 2014. In 2022, we also bought a tiny coffee roastery, and since then, we’ve been roasting our own coffee. We’re friendly, and our coffee is pretty good. You should visit us when you’re in Vienna: kaffemik, Zollergasse 5, 1070 Vienna, Austria or on kaffemik.at.

“Why are you doing this?”

When we moved into our current office in 2013, Starbucks was the only halfway decent coffee in our neighborhood. Across from us, there was a tattoo parlor that, honestly, never seemed to have anyone going in or out. We had this running joke in our office that we should open a café there if they ever went bankrupt. And here we are now…

“How did you do it?”

• We invested a total of €35k upfront. This is an incredibly small budget for opening a café in Vienna that isn’t a pop-up.
• With that, we bought an espresso machine, a good grinder, beans, milk, and renovation materials.
• We also set aside about €10k in case things didn’t go well in the first few months. This would give us some leeway to pay rent.
• We did all the rennovation work ourselves.
• We also couldn’t afford to pay any baristas in the beginning, which meant some of us were making the coffee.
• We also opened the shop while we were still renovating and building. Often, people would stand at the bar, drinking their coffee and watching us glue tiles or do other tasks over our shoulders.
• Over time, we gained a lot of regulars, and the café started running well. Then COVID hit, and it almost killed us. But we survived, and now it’s running well again.

“What’s up with the weird name?”

We couldn’t decide on a name, so we used the Schulze method and found the name most of us disliked the least. (One of us had visited Greenland, where they have a custom called “kaffemik” (literally “with coffee”) — an informal get-toghether with coffee and such.

“Will you make me coffee when I visit you?”

Nope, sorry :) Some of us worked as baristas when we started, but we’re lucky that it’s running so well now that we can pay people who do the job much better than we did. We also have an amazing manager who handles most of the day-to-day operations. I’ll definitely give you one on the house if you visit me!

“You also roast, huh?”

Yeah, our main coffee roaster didn’t want to continue in the business anymore, so he put his roastery up for sale. We struck a deal, and now we’re roasting our own beans. We’re still learning a lot every day.

“Who are you?”

As of 2023, Dieter, Martin, Andrey, Michi, and I are still part of the team, mainly handling regulatory, organizational, or design-related tasks. Sudara and Simon left the team at some point. Natascha is the main manager now and runs the shop and roastery.

“Anything else?”

Yeah! We use this as an opportunity to provide work primarily for queer people—two-thirds of our staff are proudly queer, and I love that. We also try to source our coffee from mostly female-led farms, ensuring that most of the money we pay for beans stays with the families who produce them.

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