Business X Design: Aaron Fender of Portrait Coffee

Date and Time

• Thursday, Aug 20, 2026  5:30pm - 7:30pm

Location

Visit Website

Details

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?

The answer is Portrait, a roastery and shop in southwest Atlanta, housed in a building once owned by Lottie Watkins, the city's first Black female real estate broker. Aaron's wife's family has lived in the neighborhood for generations.

Nearly six years and one pandemic pivot later, Portrait has become a gathering place first and a coffee shop second, the kind of space people build a life around rather than pass through for a morning cup.

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.