After creating a successful poke bowl company, SMU business school alumnus Francois Reihani wanted to do more – something that would impact the community. So, he started La La Land Kind Café.
SMU alumnus Francois Reihani can now claim 11 locations of his La La Land Kind Café across Texas and California – but that’s not where he sees the success. “The human connection is so important,” he says.
After transferring from the University of Southern California to SMU in 2016 to study at Cox School of Business, the entrepreneur cofounded a poke restaurant but craved something with greater social impact. In 2019, he opened the first La La Land Kind Café on Bell Avenue in Dallas.
Community engagement
The shops not only encourage an attitude of kindness through branding and décor that has become , but they also fulfill a mission of foster youth employment. “From the moment we opened, the people proved the concept,” says Francois Reihani.
As further evidence of the impact on local communities, La La Land Kind Café received a $20 million investment from fellow Mustangs John Phelan ’86 and Andy Teller ’86 in June 2023 – originating with Teller’s daughter, Cameron Teller ’21, ’22 as a frequent customer.
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The human connection is so important.
Francois Reihani
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Francois Reihani
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Francois Reihani:
First store started a little over five years ago. We're sitting in it. It was a 100-year-old home. Drove down the street, looked at this place and saw what we've looked at as La La Land, converted a 100-year-old house into our first location here in Dallas. When we opened the first La Land cafe, the community response was absolutely phenomenal. I'm a pretty optimistic person. I thought it was going to go really well, but it blew all my expectations out of the water. Dallas Morning News had put out a piece on what was coming here. And so from our very first day of soft opening, it's supposed to just basically be a training. There was a line spanning the whole block. From that day on, it was really history. When I went to SMU, it helped me think about the business world in different ways. There were so many inspiring leaders who came into really small classes, by the way, which is crazy to think about, whether it's the CEO of Chase or whatever it is, and they're coming into a 30-person class. What I really got out of it most was being inspired.
We've always believed that a part of normalizing kindness is also giving genuine compliments. So when we built the company, it's always been about how do we normalize that aspect. Our team members in our stores were used to generally compliment guests that would walk in through our doors, and then COVID hit. So we were no longer able to do that. Our corporate team, which was literally three people at that time, decided, why don't we get in a car and just start yelling compliments out the window? We're refreshing the video. It was 10,000 views, 20,000 views, 100,000 views. And the next morning, had a million views. And we were all freaking out about how this really simple thing came together, impact so many people. And we're the most followed business in the world on TikTok over Nike, Google, you name it, Apple. As a company, for us, we've looked at it in a very organic way. We're not using social media to drive sales to our stores. We're using social media to get people to understand who we are as a brand and what our core is, and to also influence the world to be kind.
The beauty of coffee, and what we're doing is we get to see millions of people a year. If you walk in here every day and you're being greeted warmly and they're complimenting you and they're telling you they love you as the cup of coffee is handed to you. If you do that enough times, that'll have an effect on you through time. So, through time, how do we get people to see and understand that, hey, through very simple practices every day, if we're conscious of it, that kindness can be normal and the world would be a lot better placed with that, and especially with this next generation of kids growing up that are going to set a new culture. For us in our stores and through social media and our impact, we hope the legacy that we leave is a much kinder culture for the future.