How Do You Make a Tiny Café Impossible to Miss?

Loud Baby occupies just 125 square feet of retail space on Flatbush Avenue, but its story stretches far beyond the storefront.

Maritza and her sister Veronica opened the café nine years ago, before the surrounding stretch became crowded with coffee shops. They grew up in southern Ecuador, where coffee was part of everyday life, and built a Brooklyn business shaped as much by art and community as by hospitality.

Maritza is a fashion designer, and the café carries baby clothing she makes herself. A separate space above the shop has also hosted meditation sessions, language gatherings, and other community events. Even the name Loud Baby reflects a larger idea: the creative voice inside a person that survives the pressure to become quieter, safer, or more conventional.

The neighborhood has changed around the café. New shops have opened nearby, several of them larger and positioned on more prominent corners, while the costs of coffee, milk, labor, and nearly everything else required to run an independent café have continued to rise.

Maritza is now thinking about how Loud Baby can evolve while preserving the qualities that have sustained it for nine years.

That question led her to a DoneThat conversation with Travis Wolf, the former CFO of La La Land Kind Café. Travis built the company's finance function as it expanded from a handful of cafés to roughly 30 locations across four states. Earlier in his career, he was the first finance hire at a fast-growing space company.

Given that background, Maritza might have expected the conversation to begin with margins, labor ratios, or the price of milk. Travis began with attention.

What makes someone notice a café? What makes them remember it, photograph it, and tell somebody else to go?

Those questions connect directly to the economics. Products attract attention. A strong story gives that attention meaning. Together, they shape what customers believe an experience is worth and how much room an owner has to build a sustainable business.

A product can carry the story

At La La Land, the team considered how a drink would look before the first sip, particularly on a phone screen.

Some of its layered drinks created clean bands of color in the cup. Customers would eventually stir the layers together, but often only after taking a photograph. The visual effect was part of the product from the beginning.

For a small café, that matters. Advertising is expensive and foot traffic is uneven, but a distinctive drink can travel beyond the storefront when customers want to photograph it, share it, and bring someone back to try it.

Loud Baby already has a rich visual and cultural identity, from Maritza's background in fashion to the café's Ecuadorian roots and the colorful world suggested by its name. Travis saw an opportunity to express more of that identity through the menu.

A drink influenced by Ecuadorian flavors, Maritza's aesthetic, or the history of the café could become an invitation into the larger story. It would also give customers something recognizably Loud Baby to share.

Give people a reason to come now

A café can be loved and still need fresh reasons for people to visit. Seasonal drinks, limited releases, and special programming create urgency. They answer a simple question: why should I go today rather than someday?

Travis had seen that dynamic at La La Land, where products and campaigns gave customers something specific to anticipate, photograph, and discuss. The first visit came from curiosity. The harder work was turning that curiosity into a habit.

Loud Baby has unusually strong material to work with because its identity extends beyond coffee. Fashion, art, Latin American culture, and neighborhood life already overlap there. The challenge is helping a newcomer understand that richness quickly.

Many businesses spend years trying to invent a story. Loud Baby has accumulated one naturally. Its next products and experiences can give more people a way into it.

Value has to be visible

When the conversation turned to the economics, Travis connected them to everything that had come before.

An owner sees the full cost behind a drink: the quality of the coffee, the labor, the waste, the rent, the equipment, and the cumulative effect of inflation. A customer sees the experience in front of them and decides what it feels worth.

That makes product design and storytelling part of the business model. A distinctive drink attracts attention. The story around it makes the experience more memorable. Together, they help customers understand why one café is different from the next.

For Loud Baby, that distinction already exists in the history, the design sensibility, and the community around the shop. The opportunity is to make more of that value visible.

"Don't tiptoe into it"

Maritza is also thinking about new ways to use Loud Baby's space and bring people together.

Her instinct was to test any new idea cautiously. Travis pushed her to give the experiment enough energy to learn something real.

"Don't tiptoe into it," he said. "Make a splash."

A soft opening may help an owner work through operational details, but customers still need to understand that something meaningful is happening. A real event creates anticipation. It gives people a reason to invite a friend, change their plans, or share the experience afterward.

That matters because an underpromoted test can produce the wrong lesson. A quiet night may appear to prove that customers are uninterested when too few people understood what was happening or why they should attend.

Loud Baby already has the ingredients for programming that feels true to the business: Maritza's artistic perspective, its Ecuadorian roots, and the community that has grown around the shop. The strongest version would feel unmistakably like Loud Baby.

Seeing the asset clearly

The surprising part of the conversation was how little time the former CFO spent prescribing cuts. Travis understood the numbers, but he also understood what shapes them.

Why does someone notice this place? Why do they choose it? What stays with them after they leave, and what makes them bring somebody back?

A larger competitor can replicate a menu item or build a more prominent storefront. It cannot reproduce Maritza and Veronica's history, Maritza's perspective as an artist, the café's Ecuadorian roots, or the community that has formed around the shop over nine years.

Those qualities are part of Loud Baby's moat. The work ahead is to express them through products and experiences that customers can immediately see, feel, and share.

After the call, Maritza described the value of speaking with someone who had encountered similar decisions before. That may be the clearest expression of what an experienced operator can offer. Sometimes the best advice helps an owner recognize the strength of what she has already built and decide how to bring more people into it.

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Travis Wolf is the former CFO of La La Land Kind Café. Through DoneThat, he speaks with food and beverage owners navigating decisions involving growth, margins, positioning, and new operating models.