Business X Design: Aaron Fender of Portrait Coffee
From the venue:
Aaron Fender co-founded Portrait Coffee after a trip to Rwanda changed how he saw the coffee industry. Drawing on his background in leadership roles across multiple verticals, he was only 22 when he watched local washing stations control the economies around them, extracting value from the places that grew the coffee. Eventually, he posed a question that now informs everything he does: How do we completely reimagine the world of coffee to keep equity rooted in the community instead of passing through it? In this edition of Business x Design, Aaron will be in conversation with Gene Kansas about the decisions—geographic, architectural, and economic—behind building a company that treats its supply chain and its neighborhood as design problems worth solving.
Business X Design: Aaron Fender of Portrait C... | 08/20/2026 9:30 PM