Dahsar's + Matsar

Food and Beverage, Catering, Matcha, Wellness, who's going to stop me?

To spice up my world, I started expanding my universe to the things I love:

I introduced a food and beverage, consumer goods packaging, retail & catering service arm within our studio called Dahsar’s. We debuted at Hester Street Fair upstate at Windham, NY. My love for coffee shops and pop ups combined.

I always had dreams to open up my own coffee shop one day. I’ve been working in coffee since I was a teenager. My first job was when I was 16, working at a coffee shop at the Philadelphia International Airport called Jazz & Java. To me it was a third wave coffee shop. The employers were hip, the coffee was good, and we were all a menace to society. Misfits as you would say. First time meeting friends outside the norm and had famous celeb customers such as Kevin Smith and Danny Pudi.

I worked in many different jobs but somehow in time I managed to be working at a cool job as well as a coffeeshop job. My fallback was in coffee and it always felt right. I’ve done so many coffeeshop trainings at Counter Culture to Stumptown and the coffee community always made me feel at home.

Dahsar’s will one day be a brick and mortar coffee shop connected to The Dahsar, a boutique hotel that will have private events, weddings, and co-working spaces.

I spoke this into existence the same time last year and did all the research for my new health & wellness brand called Matsar. Matsar is a matcha brand that will be evolving along as it goes. What I learned with creating Matsar was that creating something special must take time and going slow is a must. Matsar means memories. What I learned with creating Matsar is that I must go with my gut. Unlike Wear Many Hats, the podcast is always on the gas. I had special meetings with close friends on brand identities and shared ideas back and forth. I couldn’t be more grateful to have them in my life. Without them, it was the push to believe in myself. It should have been a go from the start but then I started to get cold feet.

How come? Here are some factors.

I wasn’t settled on the name. I was going back and forth on whether it should be the studio name or something else. My good friend from Philly said it had to be something else and she’s a marketing guru. So I went with that.

Of course how could I not use my last name? It’s so obvious!

But what stopped me again was that as I was about to pull the “Wear Many Hats way of committing to a project” of let’s go!

I was about to buy matsar.com but then it was scooped underneath me.

Here is a short story of how Wear Many Hats is what it is today. I bought an inflated domain name of wearmanyhats.com that was at a price that was doable to astronomical heights in 2018. It was worth it, obviously, but how do you know? Only time will tell.

I’m my father’s son. When I was a kid, he always wanting to know if a .com was available. My father is a computer engineer that loved everything that had to do with the Internet. When we were doing a project with a great project name, he always wanted to see if the .com was available. ADHD much? My father still does that today. I don’t understand how but it has brought down from his generation upon to me. Uh thanks dad? Back then I wish he would have known that he would have been thriving in SEO and branding.

I bought dahsar.com in 2012 when I was 21. If only I was investing in stocks and crypto with that same mindset, life would have been different for sure.

Fast forward to 2024, I have the opportunity for the first time to buy matsar.com but for an inflated price but then it sweeps under the rug. Disappearing and my love for starting Matsar disappears into the night with it.

A couple months later, I sit down with someone who I met at a coffeeshop job I used to have on Canal St. where I enjoyed chatting with all the time. We would make jokes, say the darnest things, have locker room talk out in the open. The good ole days. I always thought he was successful with his business but you never know what goes on behind the curtain.

I meet my long lost friend at Stumptown and he tells me he works at La Cabra. I tell him that I’m trying to find my way back to coffee since my then deteriorating health. He tells me that he survived an unfortunate health issue and has to start all over. It reminded me of me and another person that means a lot to me.

We all bounce back.

We were given this second chance.

I tell him about Matsar and how I want to get into Matcha and wellness. He tells me you have to do it. You have to. You. have. to.

From all the back and forth it was a sign right there that when he left, matsar.com was open back up to buy. I bought it immediately.

For some reason, buying inflated domains for me is a push to do the project and not dance around it. I’ve been buying up stupid domain names all year long to see if I can pursue another dream. It confirmed to me that I want to keep doing what I love under other names but I realized it was within me all along.

I’ve been photographing weddings lately and turns out it’s another favorite thing I like to do. Should I start another business? No not really, it can be under my name. But I did think up of a wedding business called Heartstring Heartstring because of this: