People & Livelihood
myPOS
Brand Residency
Tap. Sip. Go.
Behind every good cup stands a small business that chose to do things with care. Over six months, together with myPOS, we write about the people behind the counter, and what it takes to run a small place well.
About the residency
Behind the counter there is a business
For six months we write about the people behind the counter and the economics of a small, well-made business. A place made with care is also a livelihood: it has a morning rush, a month in which something went wrong, and decisions that cost. A residency is an editorial season: the brand is the context of the stories, not their hero.
myPOS is a fintech company serving small and medium businesses across the European Economic Area, Switzerland and the United Kingdom; more than 350,000 businesses in over 35 European countries rely on it. In this season, though, the brand describes itself as something quieter: “the quiet partner that keeps the till working”. That is exactly its place in the writing: a frame, not a voice.
Slow Made City already writes about people who make something small and make it well. This season reaches them from the economic side, not to advise, but to describe: what moves a month, where the seconds go in a morning rush, and what else is exchanged across a counter besides money.
Rubric 01
The People Behind the Cup
Portraits of owners and baristas who turned a passion into a livelihood
The Roaster Who Designs Mornings He Will Never See
Georgi Petrov roasts coffee in Ruse, Bulgaria, for mornings he'll never witness. No cafe, no counter, just a sealed bag carrying his signature across distances he cannot close.
5 min read
Dahlia Coffee's Second Bloom: Heritage Roasting Finds Room to Grow
Terracotta walls, horchata lattes, and a 10-kilo Proaster. Natalia Alcazar's Dahlia Coffee proves that scaling up doesn't mean shedding your roots, it means building infrastructure to go deeper.
5 min readRubric 02
What It Takes
What it takes to run a coffee shop: the courage, the numbers, the daily routine, the risks
Twelve Months of Corrections
The queue forms at 8:47 on a Tuesday in month four. Not opening day. Just the moment when everything you assumed about your cafe collapses into what it actually is.
5 min read
A Pop-Up That Refused to Stop: How Two Baristas Built a Coffee Bar from Crisis
Two baristas lost their jobs in 2020 and decided to do something crazy. Six years later, their 500-square-foot pop-up is finally getting plumbing, and that's the whole point.
5 min readRubric 03
Instant Stories
Small moments where speed matters, told by merchants and their customers
The first stories are coming soon
We will publish the first pieces in this rubric as soon as the residency starts.
Rubric 04
Money, Made Simple
Practical pieces on small-business money, plainly put, without the jargon
Rubric 05
The Tap Between
The story of that one-second tap that connects a customer and a merchant
Residency partner
myPOS residency at Slow Made City
Every residency is an editorial season: stories, people and places created together with the brand, not around it.