Pitt student and friends hope to inspire with coffee shop ownership

Strangers and neighbors continually walk in and out of the row home’s open doors. Nearly all… Strangers and neighbors continually walk in and out of the row home’s open doors. Nearly all enter empty-handed, but all leave with paper cups overflowing with coffee and tea that blur the hand stamped charcoal logo on the cups into violet.

Most of the patrons of this row home-turned-coffee shop are the older crowd.

Older men in suits eat biscotti inside while middle-aged couples dressed in shorts and tank tops work at laptops in the vintage-decorated sitting area.

At the moment, the only young people in this North Shore coffee shop called Beleza are Pitt senior Kim Walkenhorst and a friend, who work behind the counter of this business, which they own and opened in late February.

However, if all goes according to plan, not only will more young people frequent the shop, but more young people will choose to live in Pittsburgh, like Walkenhorst and her friends.

Through Beleza, Walkenhorst and six of her friends, who co-own the shop, are hoping to inspire Pittsburgh college students to remain in the city after graduation and take pride in their surroundings.

Walkenhorst transferred to Pitt from Hope College in Michigan in order to help found Beleza along with six other friends who are all recent graduates of the same school.

Beleza is the result of a dream all seven had, to move to an urban area in the United States in need of revitalization and help enact change in that area, Walkenhorst said.

The group chose the location after co-owner Gavin Deming spent a couple months in Pittsburgh working for the Pittsburgh Project, a non profit community development organization.

“We thought that Pittsburgh has so much potential, but it’s never realized because all the young people leave,” Walkenhorst said.

“There’s a real need for places like Beleza where the community can come together and spend time, and young people are the ones who should be starting these things. We wanted to prove that if you want something in Pittsburgh, there’s room for you to create it,” she said.

“None of us are business majors, and none of us really knew anything about business before we started. We were sociology majors, religion majors. I’m a literature major. But we were still able to put this together.”

Walkenhorst and her friends financed the shop through a loan from the Northside Community Development Fund and through a lot of personal ingenuity.

“We didn’t have a lot of money to spend on this. I know I certainly didn’t,” Walkenhorst said.

She and the six other co-owners refurbished the building themselves with the help of friends, who created items such as the shop’s curtains and main countertop for free. The shop’s furniture came from area vintage stores. All artwork showcased on Beleza’s walls comes from local artists.

If Beleza’s success continues, Walkenhorst said, she and her friends would like to venture into other projects benefiting the community and act as contacts for other college students interested in beginning their own businesses.

“We want this shop to be a place for art workshops for kids,” Walkenhorst said. “We’d also love to create programs to take kids backpacking and expose them to nature.”

The coffee shop is also looking into partnerships with local museums such as the Mattress Factory, which is located in the same neighborhood, to make local artwork an even bigger part of Beleza.

“I know our ideas sound lofty,” Walkenhorst said, “but we were able to put this together in two months, from the time we applied for the loan in December until the time we opened in February, so who knows what else we can do.”