We recently connected with Joelle Maritza and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Joelle, thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us a story about a time you failed?

The biggest failure I’ve experienced in my personal and professional life was this business closing the first time around. White Rose Coffee originally opened in 2017, but in 2020 we couldn’t hold on anymore. COVID impacted us immeasurably, but if we’re being honest, it really wasn’t the only reason we didn’t make it. A bad location, staffing issues, menu inconsistencies, poor marketing – there is a laundry list of reasons why our business was failing. COVID was just the cherry on top that at the time we used as an excuse to help ourselves not feel so bad, since the entire world was going through it as well. Sure we spent our time grieving, crying over what we lost. But not even two months later we were elbows deep in real time learning from these failures and starting all over again. Literally from scratch, we gutted an entire building to get the coffee shop of our dreams. We created a clean slate where nothing that went wrong at our first location could happen here. We learned everything not to do, and figured out ways to completely re-evaluate everything we thought we knew. A lot of people expected us to sulk in the corner and long over what we once had. Instead we did the opposite and built something that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. And it’s our perfect coffee shop. So all in all, the failure was necessary. We got something immeasurably more amazing from it.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

In 2017, when Javier Betancourt could not find any good coffee near his tattoo shop, Ocho Placas Tattoo Company, he opened White Rose Coffee. The first location of White Rose served it’s purpose for three great years, but after Covid affected both the tattoo shop and coffee shop, Javier used this opportunity to bring his true vision to life. After 20 months of the grueling process that is building a tattoo and coffee shop in the midst of a global pandemic, White Rose Coffee opened it’s new location with Ocho Placas in December 2021. Now Co-Owned by long time barista , Joelle Maritza, White Rose is Miami’s premiere specialty coffee shop. Serving locally roasted, highly acclaimed Per’La Specialty Coffee, this shop prioritizes serving the highest quality coffee available, in a setting that is welcoming unlike any other. Also, home to the Betancourt Gallery, our space is a completely immersive experience through and through. Guests can enjoy an impeccable cup of our specialty coffee while enjoying the art they are surrounded by, both in our gallery setting and our conjoined tattoo shop. We promise to offer an experience not found any where else.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Like the rest of the World, Covid was too strong for our little business and we closed very early on in the pandemic, April 2020. Instead of sitting in the sorrow of what we lost, we built a completely new concept literally from scratch. By gutting and reimagining the inside of an old dance studio in a historic Miami building, we were able to conceptualize the coffee and tattoo shop of our dreams. Without the set back of Covid, we don’t know what path this coffee shop would’ve taken. Would we still be at our old location in stagnant energy? Would our business have failed anyway later on? All we do know is that we’re in a better place now than we could’ve even imagined in a pre-Covid society. Our community welcomed us back with open and eager arms. We have been able to access people that would never have known we existed before, yet even with all the changes, the family that created this shop, our branding, our identity, core message and heart has remained in tact, exactly as it was from day one. It’s a shop created for the love of bringing our community an experience that only exists in our shop, with the best cup of coffee you can find in this city. And we feel that as long as we stay true to that core, no matter where we go it will work.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Not to give Covid too much credit because it did ruin everyone’s life there for a good while, but it definitely caused us to completely reevaluate the direction we were headed. We went from having a full service, full staff restaurant cafe to a sole employee espresso bar inside of a tattoo shop. While that description leaves a lot to be desired, this was truly a blessing in disguise for our business. We are now more streamlined than we’ve ever been, are serving the highest quality product we are capable of making, and have customers returning more happy and excited than we ever saw in our old shop. In the thick of it we definitely couldn’t see that we were building to better things, but completely changing our plan to something we never imagined, accepting that we either had to cannonball into the unknown or drown in our circumstances, we moved with the tide. We couldn’t be more humbled by the path that we can now see illuminated before us because of all the changes we accepted. We just had to keep an open mind.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.whiterose.coffee/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whiterosemia/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/whiterosecoffeemia
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/whiterosemia
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/white-rose-coffee-no-title
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@whiterosecoffee

Image Credits
all images credit of White Rose Coffee