There’s never been a better time to show up

Café Tondo and the case for presence in a digital-first world

Sep 26, 2025

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Hi everyone, as with any internal initiative, other priorities can take our attention away for short periods of time.

We’ve had quite the summer. A team retreat in Big Bear, welcoming new team members, speaking at design conferences in Budapest and Cusco, and opening a cafe-bar in Los Angeles. The café has been massively successful since launch and we’ve yet to find time to put into words why we decided to pursue this idea, as most people find it confusing why a design studio might try to enter the hospitality industry.

While this Findings piece answers that question, it also serves as a broader cultural response to why physical presence may be the most valuable asset for brands and businesses today, even as the world continues to push the digital agenda.

There’s no denying it’s a digital world we live in today. Tech platforms have spent a concerted effort over the past several decades to convince us that IRL holds no candle to the online world. Friendships can be streamed, communities simulated, rituals replicated with headsets and avatars. Brands followed suit, pouring billions into virtual concerts, gamified storefronts, and digital worlds that promised connection but only delivered fertile territory for meme-making.

But nobody reminisces about the chatroom they were in last night. We remember the conversations at dinner with friends, the live musical performances that move the room, and gatherings that make us feel part of something larger than ourselves.

So we’re betting against the prevailing forces. We wager that physical presence is, and will continue to be, the most valuable asset in creating true loyalty. Brands that can find ways to meaningfully show up for their audiences will leave their competitors behind.

I. We’ve been doing this for a long time now

The instinctual need to gather is both ancient and true over the course of human history.

Historians trace it back hundreds of thousands of years to the fire circle, where early humans told stories and passed down knowledge. Civilizations later formalized the practice: the Greek agora, the Roman forum, the medieval marketplace. Each a stage for politics, trade, ritual, and debate.

The health of a society has always depended on the spaces where people met face to face; Priya Parker reminds us in The Art of Gathering that democracies protect the right to assemble precisely because of what can happen when people come together. Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, often strip it away first because they know what happens when people exchange knowledge and inspire one another.

This simple idea of gathering has repeated across cultures and generations. Pilgrimages, festivals, and religious ceremonies have drawn people across the world. Coffeehouses in 17th-century London were called “penny universities” because of the ideas traded over a single cup. And of course, today we gather in bars, restaurants, cafés and other places that are considered infrastructure to facilitate conversation and belonging. Modern sociologists call these Third Places—spaces outside of home (first place) and work (second place) where community and identity are built. Many people are worried about the disappearance of said places, and for good reason.

II. Commerce showed up uninvited

Brands have been inserting themselves into the gathering equation for as long as anyone can remember.

At the turn of the 20th century, World’s Fairs became global stages for brands to demonstrate their vision of the future. Visitors watched the first moving walkways, marveled at electric lights, sampled Coca-Cola, and tested Kodak cameras. Later, automakers invited consumers to test-drive cars, while department stores staged live demos of kitchen appliances to prove modern convenience. These early forms of experiential marketing resonated because they were participatory. Brands could extend beyond print and signage to sell an idea. People could see, feel, and experience it themselves. And the experience was the point.

Where experiences used to be the foreground, the thing itself, we’ve now witnessed these communal moments be transformed into backdrops for content. Pop-ups, Instagram museums, and immersive activations became less about what people felt in the room and more about what they posted afterward. The “experience” became the photo, not the memory.

And of course, the pandemic forced a hard stop. With physical gatherings suspended, brands turned to digital proxies: concerts inside Fortnite, storefronts on Roblox, live streamed product launches. Some were clever, but most were forgettable. And while many of us remember what life was like pre-pandemic, and continue to gather outside of newly formed digital constructs, there is an entire generation coming up who crave something they’ve only seen and haven’t yet experienced.

III. Never alone but not together

Today’s generations (us included) are formulating their relationships with brands and the world at large through conflicting tensions—each pulling us in a different direction and need-state.

One force is nostalgia—a fascination with eras and aesthetics we’ve never lived through. Wearing thrifted clothes, listening to music on wired headphones, shooting film on point-and-shoot cameras, and romanticizing a past as if it were our own. Such gestures are a way of reclaiming texture, slowness, and things that feel unmediated in a world that is overly optimized.

On the other side is a reality we can’t escape—the constant buzz of group chats, notifications, algorithmic feeds, and a life that is always-on. Connection is ambient, but rarely grounding. It’s a culture of perpetual tethering. Never truly alone, but not always together.

And finally, a deep skepticism. Gen-Z notably has grown up with advertising in every feed, influencers blurring into brands, and dealing with brands that overpromise and underdeliver. In the past, generations faced discontent with a rage against the machine mentality. When the machine becomes so intertwined into the fabric of our society, opting out is the most practical way of rebelling.

It’s within this tension that the desires of today’s generations come forward. The pull toward the analog is less about retro aesthetics than about what those objects symbolize: presence, tactility, memory that lasts. The challenge is that the world they’ve inherited doesn’t give them enough of these spaces—and when they do exist, they’re met with scrutiny.

IV. The infrastructure of belonging

The disappearance of third places is a complicated and layered problem, and not as simple as “make more of them.” Rising labor costs, increasing suburbanization, and the feedback loop of social isolation have made it harder to create spaces where people can simply exist—without the pressure to consume, transact, or perform.

At the same time, scarcity has made the few surviving institutions stand out even more. Certain cafés, bookstores, and bars have managed to transcend the local level, becoming cultural topics of conversation rather than just places to eat, drink or purchase. The whitespace described in this essay began to reveal itself to us a few years ago, as it became clear that our social climate was shifting in real time.

Café Tondo is our response—an all-day café-bar inspired by the rhythm of Latin American culture: coffee and pastries in the morning, a neon-lit hideaway with natural wine at night. In just six weeks, it has become a cultural gathering place for Los Angeles. Nearly every day brings programming—food pop-ups, live music, artist launches—that spill into the street and create moments where people have no place to be other than the present.

The reception has been extraordinary. Critics have called it the “Spot of the Summer” and written that “It feels like Los Angeles finally gets its slice of New York or Paris,” cities that fundamentally encourage third places to exist. Online, Tondo has grown rapidly not just as a restaurant, but as a cultural reference point, and a place that inspires memes and carries a presence beyond its four walls.

V. Be a villager

What this dynamic proves to us is something we’re always pushing our clients to internalize at the studio: that community isn’t just a nice-to-have anymore. It’s not something you can half-heartedly target with whatever leftover budget you may or may not have at the end of the fiscal year.

Presence is the new currency. When product innovation, cost, and convenience can easily be matched across a category, brands that can create truly worthwhile experiences will strike a deeper chord with audiences. We often find this to be less of an issue of time, resources, and energy, and more of an issue of intent and desire.

“Everybody wants to have a village, but nobody wants to be a villager.” Building presence takes an immense amount of effort. It is often thankless work, and requires teams to put themselves out there in ways that are vulnerable and unfamiliar. That might mean building an experience for ten people to show up to when you have thousands of followers. If you’re too scared of that reality, of that perception, then community will always remain outside your reach. The cost of community is inconvenience.

For Tondo, programming was the clear way forward, but it’s different for each brand and community member. You can’t influence culture from the outside. So get to the heart of what matters and invite people in to share and shape it together. Make actual space. Tend to it. And tend even more to the people who are willing to fill it.

Thanks for reading

Findings is a project by Mouthwash Studio, a design studio centered on new ideas and defining experiences. Learn more about what we’re doing with Findings here. In the archive, you’ll find all our work to date surrounding this project.

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