Coffee shop CEO gives pep talk to employees in Dallas, Texas
La La Land Kind Cafe strives to spread kindness through every customer interaction.
A compliment can have a notably positive impact on someone else's mood or perspective — and one coffee shop is attempting to do this on a regular basis.
La La Land Kind Café is based In Dallas, Texas, with eight stores throughout the country.
The company's motto?
Normalize kindness.
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Founder and CEO Francois Reihani shared background about the café with Fox News Digital in a phone interview and revealed more about the organization that sparked his business idea.
Francois Reihani is CEO of La La Land Kind Café, based in Dallas, Texas. On the right, the inside of one of his stores. (Jeremiah Sabado)
Reihani attended a meeting for Dallas CASA — a court-appointed special advocate organization, in which individuals speak on behalf of minors in the foster care system.
He said that meeting is where he learned about kids who age out of the foster care system at age 18.
"Three kids went up, and the first one said their story," he said.
"It was the absolute most unbelievable thing I’d ever heard."
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Reihani became passionate about helping young people in foster care.
"It sticks with you forever. No one understands that there’s a problem, a massive, deep, dark problem," he said.
La La Land Kind Café has a motto of normalizing kindness — and every employee is aware of it and aims to share those beliefs. (Jeremiah Sabado)
A year after launching a nonprofit to help foster youth with housing, therapy and mentorship, Reihani said it just wasn’t working.
He said one of the main issues was that these kids couldn’t get a job.
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"I wanted to not only create the place that hired and mentored these kids — it was about creating a program that we could share with other businesses," he said.
La La Land Kind Café was then born with a two-fold mission: to support foster care youth and spread kindness while doing it.
The first location opened in 2019 in Dallas, Texas, as a place for foster youth to get their footing and learn skills in the workforce.
The inside of each shop is meant to be pleasing aesthetically to customers. (Jeremiah Sabado)
The 8-week program helps foster youth acquire on-the-job training skills and customer service skills — along with a mentorship experience.
While the café helps support foster youth, the employees are also spreading kindness wherever they can — including on Tik Tok.
"We believe in complimenting people and … telling people we love them," Reihani said.
One day during the COVID pandemic, he said that he and another employee, Jeremiah, decided to drive around town and shout out compliments to strangers through the car window.
After impulsively pulling out a phone to record their experience, Reihani said the two put a video together — and uploaded it to Tik Tok.
"That night, it got like 10,000 views, and we were all freaking out."
He added, "The next morning … a million. Now, these videos can get 10 … 20 … 30 million views," he said.
The Tik Tok videos simply show one person giving a stranger on the street a nice compliment to brighten that person's day.
The yellow cups at the coffee station in La La Land have a role to play in the company's marketing strategy, the CEO shared with Fox News Digital. (Jeremiah Sabado)
"The main problem with those videos … it shouldn’t be that [this experience of spreading love] is uncommon."
From the social media presence to the in-store experience, La La Land is making sure its customers feel the love, he said.
"At the end of the day, what every human wants is just great human connection and love for each other."
Each customer is given a compliment upon placing an order at the store, and the coffee cup itself even spreads kindness.
Some of the cups say, "Normalize kindness" or "Just be nice."
The café is known for its yellow coffee cups that have encouraging and complimenting statements printed on them. (Jeremiah Sabado)
The brand recently opened its first-ever drive-thru location in Richardson, Texas, and continues to test out how to spread kindness to others.
"At the end of the day, what every human wants is just great human connection and love for each other," said Reihani.
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"We can’t take these things for granted," he said.
"I’m just happy that as a company, we were able to prove a small point."
