Olaf Growald
Riley Kiltz, founder and CEO of The Craftwork Group
An odd sense of stillness fell over the empty café as Riley Kiltz closed up shop for the day at The Foundry District location of Craftwork Coffee Co. Hitting the lights, he sat down for a moment and stared silently at the space.
It was spring, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that shook local businesses in a way no one could have predicted, and Craftwork was no exception. The Fort Worth-born company had been growing at a seemingly nonstop pace since opening its first location at Camp Bowie Boulevard in 2016. The original concept was a novel one — coffee shop up front, coworking space at the back — and the neighborhood fell in love with both. Craftwork would spend the next four years building off Camp Bowie’s success, opening another shop on Magnolia Avenue, and eventually expanding outside city limits to Austin.
But for Kiltz, Craftwork Foundry was something special. In a burgeoning district just north of West Seventh Street, defined by colorful murals, upscale bars, and eclectic shops, Kiltz wanted the design of this Craftwork to fit the locale — something that contrasted the brutal minimalism of Camp Bowie and the warm, wood-heavy aesthetic of Magnolia.
Inspiration would come from Kiltz’s then-four-year-old daughter, Talitha.
“Dad, I want a pink Craftwork,” she said.
So, like a good dad, Kiltz made it happen. The Foundry opened in 2018 with a notably lighter feel, its walls painted a blush, pink tone in honor of Tal’s request.
But, two years later, on that quiet night in the spring, Kiltz took a long, hard look at the empty coffee shop, pondering its future. He knew the numbers — revenue for Foundry fell 46% during the pandemic, and the likelihood of breaking even was becoming close to impossible.
When Kiltz’s wife, Emily, picked him up that night, he got in the car and told her his harsh realization: “I don’t think we’re going to make it out here.”
On Saturday, Nov. 7, Craftwork Foundry served its final cup of coffee.
“So much of who you are is in these spaces,” Kiltz says. “For this to disappear all of a sudden, it’s really painful.”
Kiltz has been doing a lot of self-reflection lately, becoming more comfortable opening up about his struggles with Craftwork and falling into what he calls “The Pit of Despair.” In fact, that’s the title of his new podcast, which launches Dec. 1 and features interviews with recognizable Fort Worthians like Grady Spencer and Esther Miller, talking about their own experiences with failure.
The podcast won’t earn Craftwork any money, nor will it be the key to Craftwork’s post-pandemic recovery, but Kiltz hopes it’ll at least lift a few spirits and help others feel comfortable with vulnerability.
“Let’s make the city feel less alone in their failures,” he says, “not for the sake of having a big pity party, but for the sake of building hope, knowing you’re not the only one who’s choosing to fight it out.”
The fight goes on for Craftwork as the company looks to a new business model that Kiltz hopes will start turning things around. Not long after Foundry closed, Craftwork opened a new location inside The Cooper apartment complex in the Near Southside — the first venture in a grand experiment that, if successful, could forever change the future of Craftwork Coffee Co. And while it may be a bit of a gamble, Kiltz says he’s confident in the company’s direction.
After all, “it’s 100% built upon all the dents in the car that we’ve had for five years.”
Olaf Growald
Brewing Success
The concept of Craftwork, interestingly enough, was born out of Kiltz’s experiences working in real estate investments. A frequent traveler, Kiltz often found himself at a coffee shop or café to help ease the loneliness of life on the road. Eventually, he decided to marry the coffee-and-coworking concept, teaming up with Collin Sansom to launch the first Craftwork Coffee Co. on Camp Bowie.
The location was met with surprising success. In a city where craft coffee only came from places like Buon Giorno and Avoca, the Camp Bowie neighborhood readily embraced the new shop. Quality espresso along with inventive signature drinks like the Camellia (a combination of chai and matcha) gave Craftwork an edge. But perhaps what most set Craftwork apart was its service — baristas trained to build relationships and, in turn, create regulars. Coupled with Craftwork’s coworking element, Kiltz and Sansom realized they were onto something.
In April 2017, the two launched a roasting company and another café on Magnolia in the same month. When the eclectic Southside crowd responded with the same energy, the business-minded Kiltz began to grow enamored with the idea of growth — bringing Craftwork outside the bounds of Fort Worth with the noble mission of building community over a good cup of coffee.
“You start thinking, ‘Well, we can do this everywhere,’” he says. “If we can do this here, then why can’t we do it a hundred times?”
But the idea didn’t sit well with Sansom.
“Collin really wanted to focus on developing a local community and staying a small, intentional company; I was really focused on scale,” Kiltz says. “We decided not to run down the field together.”
So, the two parted ways, and Kiltz moved forward with his plans for Craftwork’s growth.
The following year, Craftwork announced an ambitious expansion plan — to open 15 shops in 15 apartment communities around Texas by 2021. Craftwork acquired WorkFlourish, a Houston-based company that builds coworking spaces in residential buildings, with WorkFlourish’s founder, Trevor Hightower, joining Craftwork as chief development officer alongside Kiltz as CEO. By July, they closed their first round of series A funding — a total of $3 million. Craftwork Foundry opened a month later, and Craftwork Domain — the first of the apartment concepts — opened the following year in Austin.
Like its Fort Worth predecessors, the Austin location of Craftwork was also a success, which only prompted Kiltz and Hightower to push their idea even further. Eventually, they’d find themselves miles away from Texas — from Boston to Phoenix to Denver — pitching their idea to big-name apartment developers.
But there were a couple issues with their proposal. One was a disconnect between Craftwork and the apartment itself — an issue that made itself apparent at Domain, Kiltz says. “The intent around Craftwork was, how do you drive out isolation in your community? Then we realized, ‘Oh, hold up — we’re looking at a big problem for a big asset class, and then we’re just saying the answer is Craftwork applied as is, in this apartment, which is a little bit naive ... We weren’t really working together to drive out isolation or to make the resident feel more connected. It felt more transactional — cool, you’re a tenant, it’s a nice amenity to have a coffee shop, but it wasn’t more than that.”
The second issue was timing — while many developers embraced the idea of a coffee shop built within their space, they wanted Craftwork involved at the inception of the project, meaning the shop wouldn’t open until two or three years later. The problem with that — anything can happen between two to three years. Products can change. The market can change. Competition in that area can change. It just wouldn’t be realistic.
Kiltz recalls feeling that cold splash of reality in November 2019 during a meeting with the CEO of Greystar in Charleston, South Carolina: “The CEO turns to us and says, ‘Love the idea. I have a deal for you in 2024, 2025 … [but] what can you do with my 2,000 assets tomorrow?’ And we’re like, ‘We don’t know.’”
There was another problem facing Craftwork that year. As the company began turning its focus toward residential communities, Fort Worth’s coffee scene began to explode. New brands began opening from the Near Southside to Camp Bowie, while coworking giants like WeWork added to the competition. As a result, Craftwork’s existing shops began to take a hit.
“Then you basically start pulling all the levers,” Kiltz says. “Do we need to spend more on marketing? Do we need to handle training? Do we need to change staffing? We’re just pulling all these levers at the store level, because if you bet on a business model, if you’re going to a place two years from now, and someone’s spending money on that location, you want that business model to be down pat … What we saw in 2019 was, hold on, we have some work to do.”
So, during Craftwork’s company retreat in January, the team outlined a strategy that they believed would set up both the cafés and apartment concepts for success. There was a sense of optimism entering 2020, Kiltz says. “Yes, 2019 was not the best year for us, but we had a plan.”
Then the pandemic happened.
Olaf Growald
Roasted
March was “by far the hardest month ever” for Craftwork, Kiltz says. As COVID-19 forced nationwide lockdowns to control the virus’s spread, Craftwork found itself furloughing 90% of its team. The stores also shut down for six weeks — an effort to, one, step back and figure out how to continue business in a mask-wearing, highly sanitized community and, two, rework its hospitality pitch for apartment developers.
Craftwork Coffee Co. soon rebranded as The Craftwork Group, reflecting its identity as a hospitality company, and also came up with a better apartment pitch: Craftwork will replace the traditional concierge, offering not just a ground-floor café but also other amenities like poolside beverage service and resident access to private work areas. Kiltz says developers loved the idea, and what once was a project that needed two to three years to build out could now be open within two to three months. It would launch in Fort Worth first, inside Lang Partners’ development, The Cooper, on West Rosedale Street.
That fall, Kiltz and his crew had their work cut out for them. They’d close Foundry, open Cooper, and continue their plan to enter the hospitality industry under a new name and business model — a whirlwind of events that seemed to happen so suddenly and so fast, Kiltz hardly had time to breathe, let alone feel.
Until he did.
One day, sometime in October before the closing of Foundry, Kiltz asked his team if he could step out for a minute. “I just need to go for a drive,” he told them. So, he got outside and drove around, eventually stopping at Rockwood Park, where he parked his car — and wept.
“It wasn’t long,” Kiltz says, “but there’s real grief here. If I don’t bring the powerful thing that an emotion is into Craftwork, then Craftwork is less as a result of it. You need to feel in order to build.”
For Kiltz, this was his pit of despair. The loss of a shop. The uncertainty of a business model that may or may not wind up successful. But Kiltz realized it wasn’t a place he could stay. When one falls into the pit, there’s really only one way to go: up.
After taking a moment, he drove back to Craftwork’s Shamrock Avenue roastery and got back to work.
Olaf Growald
Out of the Pit
Kiltz says he’s learned a lot from the past five years running Craftwork. He learned that a relationship-oriented business model works best at a local level. He also learned that hard work and determination won’t solve the problems of a broken system.
But the biggest lesson of all — it’s OK to fail, so long as you keep going.
“You have the closing of a chapter in that sense. Whether it’s a chapter or just the turning of a page, I don’t really know, but there’s another story to be written going forward,” Kiltz says. “What I’m trying to avoid is the naive hope that I had before and really be intentional on each move that we’re making to make sure that we don’t get in the same place.”
Craftwork’s future remains ambitious — to open 12 locations by the end of 2021, but under a new, hopefully better plan. And, hey, if it ends in failure, Kiltz isn’t afraid to face it.
“I don’t regret the last five years of realizing that I leaned in hard to a non-scalable business,” he says. “I would do it all over again because the road was worth it.”
Perhaps Kiltz’s daughter, Talitha, said it best. On the day she found out her “pink Craftwork” was closing, she faced her father, and with a look of “sheer will and determination” in her eyes, she said, “No, Dad, you’re going to find a way out of this. This shop may shut down, but we have the other ones, and we’re going to keep pushing forward.”
Kiltz could only agree.
“Tal, you’re so right,” he told her. “This is our moment.”
Olaf Growald
January 2016 Craftwork’s first location opens on Camp Bowie
April 2017 Craftwork Magnolia and roasting company launch
December 2017 Sansom and Kiltz part ways
February 2018 Kiltz meets Hightower, and they partner to raise capital to put Craftwork into 15 apartment communities in three years
July 2018 Craftwork closes its first round of series A funding totaling $3 million
August 2018 Craftwork Foundry opens
November 2019 Craftwork meets with Greystar executive team in Charleston
January 2020 Craftwork decides to focus on hospitality
March 2020 Shops shut down for six weeks, Craftwork begins building hospitality company
November 2020 Craftwork Foundry closes, Craftwork at The Cooper opens
Olaf Growald
My Pit of Despair: Esther Miller, owner of Gifted
I was three months into opening the doors of my shop, just hired my first part-time employee, and had no set schedule or routine to my life as a new business owner, mom, and wife outside of shop hours — yet I thought I could truly take on the world.
This project — let’s call it the “Lotus Project” — came across my lap through a customer-turned-friend. The project started off small in my mind. I was to wrap 300 gift boxes for a company and ship them individually to their recipients. The client was happy about the outcome because of the positive feedback from their gift recipients. And through the notoriety of this client, I believe I was able to secure other corporate clients and build a blueprint for how to execute large-scale projects like this — these other corporate clients and blueprints remain with me to this day.
Because the project saw sparks of great success the first round in the eye of the client, the scope of the project grew. It grew from a wrapping and shipping job to a fully customized gift order twice a year for 300 gifts each time.
Long story short, the third round was the last round I put these gifts together for the client, and it was the worst round. For this round, I thought I had it down. I planned everything ahead of time. I broke down the various tasks necessary and delegated them to my trusted employees, as well as trusted friends who were hired as my temporary employees for this project for some extra cash.
Though the project was executed mostly well, my client was not happy that a handful of their gift recipients ended up with missing pages to their letters, wrongly addressed envelopes, and items missing in their boxes. One gift wrongly put together would have been a failure in my mind, but there were close to 30 out of 300. That’s almost 10%. This was completely unacceptable. I remember so clearly — my client told me that they were concerned that something good they were trying to do could’ve been misconstrued as sloppy or having a worse effect than doing nothing at all. I think I remember crying when I read that text because I was so embarrassed.
What’s worse is that I realized I had severely undercharged for the project. I had never priced out anything like this before, so I didn’t fully realize I was passing on my costs to this client and that I was making very little profit from this. In the end, I ended up losing money because it was more labor than I had anticipated. Even though I had done this two times before, this round was different, and I didn’t account for that. A lot of stress, chaos, and disappointment was created, all for me to lose money and for a client to be unhappy. That is failure.
The combination of optimism and overachieving in one person can be amazing or lethal depending on how you use it. This experience has taught me humility in new heights. I had to admit my mistakes in front of so many people — the most embarrassing of which were my employees whom I adore — and figure out a way to be better for it. I learned that I can’t rush success. I can’t promise things that I don’t know with 100% of certainty that I can execute when it comes to a paying client. I learned that I definitely don’t have everything figured out and that owning a business is a constant learning experience that requires patience, diligence, and an incredible amount of sacrifice and hard work.
As for the Lotus Project, after all of the gifts were corrected and the holiday season was over, I met with my client, and we had a heart to heart. It was the best breakup I ever had. The client was extremely gracious and understanding in my shortcomings, and they were even grateful for helping them set up the blueprint for their gifting program. We agreed that parting amicably would be for the best, and to this day, I am so grateful for the people I met while working on that project.
Olaf Growald
My Pit of Despair: Grady Spencer, musician
On Jan. 3, I decided that I was going to finally make the leap and end my 10-year career of working in commercial construction to finally do music full time. In the months leading up to January, I had just simply bitten off way too much to chew in my life. I was working 50 – 60 hours a week in my construction day job, while at the exact same time, the booking agency that I had signed with had me out traveling for shows every weekend. My tank was just empty, and at the risk of sounding dramatic, I believe I was coming extremely close to some sort of breakdown. Thanks to the proactive actions of my beautiful wife, I started going to therapy and through that process came to the conclusion that I was put here in this place at this time to be a full-time musician. It was life-changing in every sense of the word and is a chapter of my life that I’ll never forget.
We played our last show in Austin in early March of 2020. So little was known at the time about COVID-19 and how the virus would impact everyone, but all I knew is that everything was canceled. I lost count of how many shows were canceled throughout the following six months, but needless to say, it was a lot. So, in almost a blink of an eye, almost half of my income that I had counted on to survive and provide for my family just vanished into thin air. All of a sudden, all the math equations that my wife and I had tirelessly gone over time and time again were suddenly not worth the paper they were written on. And we didn’t know what would happen.
I was scared out of my mind, which sounds a bit dramatic given that we’re talking about a career where I stand on a stage and play a guitar and sing. But I was scared and frustrated that something that seemed so right and perfect for my family and my life was suddenly looking like it was going to fade away. My mind was reeling for days on end about how I was going to scrape together the income that my family needed to survive. But also, it was somewhat exciting to look at this chapter as a challenge to rise to the occasion and get creative with how I was going to make a living for 2020.
The biggest thing was that as much as I was viewing my identity as a musician, there never was a moment that my true identity of a human being created by a loving God was ever in jeopardy. As my circumstances, job title, and day-to-day stresses churned and circled around me every single day, who I am and what I was created for never wavered. And that gives me hope that no matter what happens with my career, I’m freed up to enjoy my life and my family and look at the bigger picture in life. It’s incredibly freeing to think like that for myself.
Luckily, shows are beginning to happen again very slowly as venues learn and carry out social distancing plans. We’re definitely being as careful as we can every time we go out, but it feels good to be onstage again and playing music for people. I’m extremely excited for what 2021 is going to hold and how I can hopefully contribute to society creatively.
