In Sandton, where meetings, deadlines, traffic and screens are part of everyday life, Alostro Coffee Club is taking a different approach to hospitality: creating a space where people can slow down, connect and stay awhile.
Located at The Marc in Sandton, Johannesburg, the independent café was founded by Mlondolozi Hempe and Wandisa Zuba, whose backgrounds span architecture, sustainability and law. Alostro brings together speciality coffee, food, design and hospitality, while also creating opportunities for customers to engage through community activities and events.
These include the weekly Social Sunday Run & Walk, coffee tastings, wellness sessions, cultural conversations and collaborations with local creatives and community organisations. The café has also been nominated for Best Overall Guest Experience at the South African Restaurant Awards.
Source: Supplied | Mlondolozi Hempe and Wandisa Zuba
Bizcommunity spoke to Hempe and Zuba about why they chose Sandton, how their professional backgrounds have shaped Alostro Coffee Club, the role of design in creating the guest experience, and how they are building community and customer loyalty around the café.
You both walked away from established careers in architecture, sustainability, and law. What specifically made you decide that hospitality was the vehicle for what you wanted to build next?
We actually haven’t walked away from our careers – we’re still very much practising in our respective fields while building Alostro Coffee Club alongside them. It makes life slightly more chaotic, but it has also shaped the business in ways we probably couldn’t have anticipated.
Hospitality appealed to us because it brings together so many things we already cared about: design, people, sustainability, culture and creating experiences. In our professional lives, we’re often working on projects where the impact takes months or years to become tangible. With hospitality, the feedback is immediate. You create a space, put something on a plate or in a cup, and you can see how someone responds to it.
Alostro Coffee Club became a way of exploring whether we could create a commercially viable business around a very simple idea: giving people a good reason to pause.
Sandton is engineered for fast-paced, high-stress corporate transactions. Why drop a slow-down, community-first café right into that environment, and how do office workers respond to that friction?
That friction is exactly why Sandton made sense.
People here are constantly moving between meetings, deadlines, traffic and screens. We didn’t think Sandton needed another place that simply helped people move faster. We thought there was room for somewhere that allowed you to stop for a moment without having to leave the city.
That doesn’t mean everyone suddenly spends two hours drinking coffee. Sometimes the pause is ten minutes between meetings. Sometimes it’s someone taking their laptop downstairs and working from Alostro Coffee Club for an hour. Sometimes it’s colleagues having a conversation that isn’t happening across a boardroom table.
What has been interesting is how quickly people understand what the space is trying to do. The coffee gets them through the door, but increasingly we’re seeing people use Alostro Coffee Club as part of their daily rhythm.
Looking back at your previous professional backgrounds, what skills actually translated into running a daily café operation, and what illusions about the industry did reality shatter first?
More translated than we expected.
Architecture and design teach you to think about how people move through and experience space. Sustainability teaches you to think about systems, resources and long-term impact. Law teaches you about risk, governance, contracts and structure. All of those things are useful when you’re building a business.
But hospitality also humbles you very quickly.
You can have the best strategy in the world and still have a supplier arrive late, a piece of equipment fail during breakfast service or discover that the thing you were convinced customers would love simply isn’t selling.
The biggest illusion that disappeared was probably the idea that a great concept is enough. Hospitality is an operational business. The unglamorous things like stock control, consistency, training, service, margins and showing up every day – are ultimately what protect the beautiful things people see.
Every hospitality brand talks about "aesthetic interiors", but spatial design actively shapes behaviour. How did you lay out the floor plan at The Marc to help a stressed commuter stop scrolling and decompress?
We approached the space less as an Instagram backdrop and more as an environment that should subtly change your pace.
The café needed to accommodate different behaviours. Someone grabbing a coffee before work shouldn't feel inconvenienced by someone having a long conversation, and someone wanting to sit down shouldn't feel as though they are occupying a takeaway counter.
So there are different moments within the space, places to sit alone, places for conversation and areas where you can remain connected to the energy of the café without feeling overwhelmed by it. The materials, colour palette and visual language are deliberately warm and grounded. We wanted it to feel designed, but not precious.
You can’t force somebody to put their phone away through interior design. But you can create an environment that gives them permission to look up.
With running clubs, coffee tastings, and daily journaling prompts on the tables, what has it taken to build a genuine, lasting community rather than just a busy weekend crowd?
Consistency.
Community is one of those words that brands use very easily, but you can’t declare that you have one. People decide whether they belong.
For us, it has meant creating different entry points into Alostro Coffee Club beyond simply buying something. The social runs, coffee experiences, conversations, wellness activities and small rituals around the café give people reasons to engage with each other. But the most important part happens in ordinary moments.
It’s remembering someone's name or usual order. It’s regulars recognising one another. It’s someone coming to an event alone and not feeling uncomfortable doing so.
Events can introduce people to Alostro Coffee Club, but the everyday experience is what turns that initial interaction into a relationship.
When people walk in as strangers and end up forming friendships over a cup of coffee, what has that taught you about the kind of spaces people are actually craving in the city right now?
We think people are craving what you might call a third place, somewhere between home and work where there isn’t a huge expectation attached to being there.
Johannesburg is full of people, but it can still be quite isolating. We drive between enclosed environments, work behind screens and increasingly interact digitally. Coffee shops have always had the ability to interrupt that because sharing physical space creates opportunities for spontaneous interaction.
Seeing friendships and relationships develop at Alostro Coffee Club has reinforced something we believed when we started: sometimes people don't need another networking event. They just need a comfortable place where interaction can happen naturally.
In a bustling node full of big-name franchises, what has building an independent brand taught you about earning true customer loyalty?
You can't compete with a large franchise by trying to behave like a smaller version of one.
Their advantages are scale, familiarity and resources. Our advantage is intimacy. We can listen quickly, experiment, know our customers and allow the personality of the people behind Alostro Coffee Club to come through. But being independent doesn't give you permission to be inconsistent. In fact, customers probably expect more because choosing an independent business is often a conscious choice.
We’ve learnt that loyalty is earned in very small increments. The coffee has to be good today and tomorrow. The person behind the counter matters. How you respond when something goes wrong matters.
Brand gets someone curious enough to visit you once. Experience is what gets them to come back.
Your vision is to build a network of community-driven spaces. When scaling a concept that relies so heavily on local intimacy and personal presence, what needs to stay locked down so it keeps its soul?
We think the mistake would be trying to replicate every Alostro Coffee Club exactly. What needs to scale is the philosophy rather than a carbon copy of the first store.
There are certain things we would protect quite fiercely: the quality of the coffee and food, the design principles, the warmth of the service and the idea that every Alostro Coffee Club should contribute something to the community around it.
But the expression of that should be allowed to change. An Alostro Coffee Club in another part of Johannesburg shouldn't necessarily behave exactly like Alostro Coffee Club at The Marc. Its neighbourhood should influence its programming, partnerships and community.
The ambition is to eventually build a network of Alostro Coffee Club spaces that are recognisably part of the same family without becoming anonymous.
If we can scale the systems while keeping the human experience local, we think Alostro Coffee Club can grow without losing the thing that made people care about it in the first place.
