Client Story: Two Cultures, One Drink: How Glimpse Coffee & Matcha Found Its Voice.
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
This summer, I had the pleasure of working with Chone and Jiho, co-founders of Glimpse Coffee and Matcha in Portland, Oregon. This is their story of finding not only the brand's, but also their own voices.
by Zhou Fang, Intersectional Group
Chone and Jiho didn't set out to become public speakers. They set out to build a coffee and matcha pop-up shop called “Glimpse”
Glimpse Coffee started with a simple idea: bring two cultures into one cup. Chone grew up in Myanmar, in a family that ran wholesale and retail businesses. She learned entrepreneurship the way a lot of kids do, by tagging along and helping out. Jiho grew up in South Korea and moved to the U.S. as a kid; he spent years working for someone else before coffee pulled him in, almost by accident, about three years ago. Neither of them expected to end up running a business together. Yet, both of them found, in a shared dream and in each other, something worth building. As Glimpse moved into its branding phase, Chone and Jiho ran into a challenge a lot of founders hit eventually: the concept was strong, the drinks were delicious, and they still had to be the ones to tell people about it, out loud and in front of people.
The real challenge
On paper, this looked like "public speaking practice." In reality, it was something closer to learning how to stand behind their own story. Jiho is naturally quiet, the kind of person who didn't grow up with much small talk and had learned, over the years, to keep to himself rather than open up. Talking about his own life to strangers wasn't a skill he'd ever had reason to build. Chone had the opposite problem in disguise. She was comfortable talking, but comfortable talking around things. She tended to soften hard truths, joke, overexplain, or quietly disappear from a conversation rather than say something direct that might land “wrong”.
Different starting points, same underlying challenge: how do you put something personal into the world and let people see it through your brand and products?
The work
We built a ten-hour program around that question: one intake session, two coaching sessions, a mock panel, and an integration meeting, with real feedback along the way, from me and from friends they trusted enough to practice in front of.
We started by simply talking about how each of them communicates, where they get stuck, and what they actually wanted people to know about Glimpse. From there, we built both a short pitch and a longer one, revised them together, and then moved into the physical and pragmatic side of speaking: posture, eye contact, pacing, what to do with your hands when you're holding a microphone and when you're not, etc. The mock panel was the real test: friends asking real questions, in something close to a live event set up. It's one thing to rehearse a pitch in private; it's another to answer, on the spot, "why Glimpse?" "what is Glimpse?" in front of people.
The turning point
Somewhere in that process, Jiho said something that stuck with me. After a pop-up, customers had come back for seconds and told him how much they loved the drinks. His response wasn't pride. It was doubt. "Do people really mean it? Or do they actually like it?" That question was the real work. Not "how do I speak louder" or "what do I say with my hands"; but "do I believe my own story is worth telling?"
By the mock panel, the answer had visibly shifted. Jiho's pitch became steadier and more specific, not just "I got into coffee," but a real account of what that meant to him, and why he'd stuck with it. Chone's pitch became more direct, more confident, and less hedged. They started finishing each other's thoughts on stage instead of talking past each other.
Where they landed
The feedback from the first real-time practice was honest: Jiho's posture and Chone's volume still had room to grow, and the story could lean harder into the business itself. But the bottom line was clear: this was a real, working pitch, delivered by two people who knew their own story by heart. The rest was just going to get better with more real-life practice.
In their own words, afterward:
Jiho: "Valueable experience for an introvert. It's hard to speak loud, especially about my own life. But I gained confidence and I grew in a very short time."
Chone: "I wanted to show the positive things in life, to discover the happy things, to talk in front of people. I can see the improvement for myself."
That's really what this work is about. It is not about turning someone into a different persona, but helping them find the version of their own voice that was already there, and giving them the space to practice and to trust it. A ten-hour program did not perfect their pitches and stories. What it did is to set the solid foundation for their brand and business to have a voice that is unique and personal, culturally representative, and relatable. From there, they continue to build their business and life in a city that might not have been the original home, but now very much is their home.
If your team or your founders have a story worth telling, and need the confidence and craft to deliver it, that's exactly the kind of work I do. Let's talk about what your story could sound like. zhou@intersectional.group
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