Where it began
In 2014, Maya Chen and Daniel Osei were sitting on a fire escape in the Mission with a bag of coffee they'd brought back from a hiking trip through Ethiopia's Gedeo Zone. They'd watched the farmers pick those cherries. They'd slept in the same valley where the plants grew. And now, back home, holding a cup brewed in a tired drip machine, they both thought: this deserves better.
They quit their jobs within three months. Velour opened its doors on Valencia Street in November 2014 with a single cast-iron drum roaster, a wooden counter, and a conviction that coffee could be both artistically excellent and genuinely ethical.
