Love On Top
Rachel and Keba Konte are nimble entrepreneurs, committed activists and…relationship goals.
Keba and Rachel Konte, photographed by Smeeta Mahanti
In 2018, when Rachel Konte, the Oakland-based designer behind OwlNWood, launched her All Power to the People t-shirt and sweatshirt collection—a collaboration with Fredrika Newton, the wife of the late Dr. Huey P Newton who was co-founder of the Black Panthers—she was well-prepared for the stars to align, even if she didn’t know they were about to. “The first week that we finally got our product out, it was the same weekend that the Black Panther movie came out...It wasn’t even planned like that, it just happened to be and we literally could not keep the sweatshirt in stock.”
Celebrating The Black Panther Party and their message—All Power to the People—had been on Rachel’s mind long before any blockbuster film, however. “I had always had the dream of working as a designer on a Black Panther collection, and doing it with Fredrika Newton was more that I could have hoped for,” she says. This dream, amongst so many others, would be one that Rachel would realize alongside her husband, Keba Armand Konte.
To call Rachel and Keba Konte a power couple would be an understatement. The husband-and-wife team are beloved and well-known entrepreneurs in the Bay Area, in part due to Red Bay Coffee, the roaster and cafe that Keba established in 2014. Rachel, who moved to the United States from Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1993 as a designer for Levi Strauss, is today Chief of Brand for Red Bay as well as the owner and operator of her own brand, OwlNWood. The pair, who met in 1997 and have a daughter together, discovered just how well they collaborated back when Rachel helped Keba with branding and design for Guerilla Cafe, established in 2006, then his second cafe, Chasing Lions, at the City College campus in San Francisco. When the recession hit, Rachel left Levi’s, taking her entrepreneurial and design skills with her in order to open her very own apparel and lifestyle brand, OwlNWood. Today, more than a decade later and in the midst of a social revolution and global pandemic, she has hardly broken her stride, now heading up three businesses at the same time.
“We work twenty-four hours a day. But in our house, it’s kind of like a lifestyle.”
Keba and Rachel Konte, photographed by Smeeta Mahanti
“We work twenty-four hours a day,” Rachel laughs, “But in our house, it’s kind of like a lifestyle.” A lifestyle punctuated by lots of love, mutual respect, and the occasional quick weekend away to unwind together.
The Kontes’ renown doesn’t stop at the hard work of supplying the East Bay with fair-trade, single-origin coffee or original designs and vintage clothing pieces. It’s their commitment as a family to activism that sets them apart. Both Rachel and Keba feel adamant that the products, physical spaces, employment opportunities, and branding at their companies should all be used to empower and foster community. When referring to the vision behind Red Bay Coffee, for instance, Keba emphasises that “we seek to build fair relationships by compensating our farm partners with living wages, and here at home, we continue to build pathways to coffee careers for underestimated coffee professionals. We also center community in mostly everything we do.”
This special blend of high-quality product and uncompromised values is exemplified by Rachel’s designs for Red Bay. “Our t-shirts and sweatshirts don't necessarily say Red Bay on the front. It’s not like we walk around with our logo—we always try to have some messaging. So you know, we have ‘Beautiful Coffee to the People’, we have ‘Coffee: Africa’s Gift to the World…You Are Welcome’...we have ‘Black Coffee’...So we’re using it in a way, kind of like a little signage, so that we can engage people.”
“Beautiful Coffee to the People” the mantra of the Red Bay Coffee brand, was originally coined by Keba. He describes being struck by inspiration when it comes to a message, and then watching Rachel give the words “shape, form, and context.” When describing their professional collaborations, he says, “The process is fluid and organic. We are constantly iterating on ideas, whether conceptual or visual. We have a shorthand when it comes to the creative and development process.”
“The process is fluid and organic. We are constantly iterating on ideas, whether conceptual or visual. We have a shorthand when it comes to the creative and development process.”
Rachel saw how quickly her husband fell in love with the “Beautiful Coffee to the People” tagline and wanted to bring it to life through design. But their steady creative process hit a slight, but again star-crossed, road bump when the couple learned that this play on the Black Panther Party’s mantra must be used with permission from the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation and Fredrika herself, who owns the trademarked assets of Huey Newton’s Estate. Because of their community involvement and background in activism—particularly Keba, who had been a student organizer at San Francisco State University in the 1990s and has photographed local Black revolutionary leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, David Hillard, and even Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale—this hurdle was quickly overcome. Keba had already met “the ray of sunshine Fredrika Newton,” widow of the late Dr. Huey P. Newton. The process of asking for permission began and culminated with Fredrika herself walking into Rachel’s downtown Oakland store to share the verdict. “She’s a beautiful, tall woman,” Rachel recounts, “and she came in and goes, ‘Congratulations!’”
Keba and Rachel Konte, photographed by Smeeta Mahanti
Red Bay has used “Beautiful Coffee to the People” as their tagline and hashtag ever since. But the dream of creating a Black Panther–themed line didn’t stop there. Fredrika approached Rachel at OwlNWood again in 2018 and asked for her help in creating clothing designs featuring “All Power to the People,” with a portion of proceeds going back to the Huey P. Newton Foundation. Rachel said yes immediately. “Fredrika was a godsend,” Rachel says, “and I was like, I’ll help you for free if I can have the exclusiveness of styling this for OwlNWood. And we just kicked it off.” Her partnership with Fredrika, which is now funded in part by a small business loan through Uptima Business Bootcamp that supports local Black female entrepreneurs is now it’s own exclusive brand, ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE PROJECT.LLC, and Rachel’s latest company alongside OwlNWood.
In 2020, the All Power line expanded to include face masks, and bandanas are on the way. To Rachel, like many contemporary designers trying to make it work in the era of COVID, extending the collection to include facial coverings seemed obvious. But could she have known back in late March and early April that so many people would be wanting to wear these masks to Black Lives Matter protests or as a daily form of political expression? “No!” she laughs while recalling how fast they sold out once again. “I cannot keep those masks in. I ship them out every day.”
The on-point messaging and tight connections to leaders in the community are just a few of the ways in which Rachel and Keba live their values as a couple. But for Rachel, there are more subtle forms, as well. “There are many ways in which to be an activist,” she says. When reflecting on the coffee world before Red Bay, she notes, “It was very one-sided, it wasn’t really diverse in an authentic way. You know, the diversity was a couple of Black and brown baristas at the forefront, but not like bringing in people to future careers in the industry, and not really trying to make their own companies focusing on inclusion.” She says that for Red Bay, loving and giving high-quality coffee to everybody in a more inclusive way was always the goal.
“There are many ways in which to be an activist.”
This is echoed back in her approach to apparel. For Rachel, selling and wearing vintage clothing is both a passion and a political act. “Not to produce new stuff all the time, but to actually use vintage and second-hand, and have an appreciation for that. And especially as a Black woman, I think it’s the same as coffee, there are some things like vintage, which for me are connected to high-quality…And I really wanted more people of color to appreciate that.”
Part of that appreciation came from using her and her business partner’s former 3,000-square-foot store, OAKOLLECTIV in downtown Oakland, as a way of collaborating with other creative minds in the community. “We would carry a lot of small makers, local makers, and also a lot of Black makers. Every month, we would do community events where other people would come and set up tables, or we would have speaking events and music events…That also helped the bottom line; it was bringing people into the store who maybe didn’t know about the store.” Thus helping Rachel share her love of great design and commitment to community empowerment with more people.
This concept carried over to Red Bay, where the space in Fruitvale was designed to host community events—up to 150 a month, pre-COVID, organized by Keba’s eldest daughter, Jessica. And even though Red Bay can’t quite host the same amount and type of events right now, the coffee can be ordered online or enjoyed in the community garden that they had the foresight to construct long before outdoor seating was essential for Bay Area dining establishments.
Keba and Rachel Konte, photographed by Smeeta Mahanti
“We both benefit from the success of what we do and we’re both willing to put in the same amount of, you know, just sweat and tears to make it happen because we’re in this together.”
Providing a space and a platform seems to be the Kontes’ call to action, a way to invigorate their Bay-Area base. They are invigorated by their community in return, and have a particular interest in supporting young people. Keba takes a focused interest in the health and well-being of local youth and would encourage readers to support the Dream Youth Clinic, as well as local businesses and BIPOC entrepreneurs. Rachel underlines the need to seek out and employ the local, talented young artists, many of which she collaborates with on a regular basis. These hard-working models, photographers, and other creative minds give her hope when it comes to the next generation of movers and shakers: “They are just self-motivating. And they’re driven. I mean, very driven.”
Perhaps the couple’s greatest source of inspiration, however, comes from one another. Rachel Konte feels that she and Keba are lucky to have found not only love but an ability to work seamlessly together. As the light currently shines on Rachel’s work as an individual designer outside of her work at Red Bay, she knows that her biggest supporter is none other than her husband and business partner. “We always see it as a joint thing. And as two Leos, we understand when one needs to shine and when the other needs to shine—there’s no competition in that. And we both benefit from the success of what we do and we’re both willing to put in the same amount of, you know, just sweat and tears to make it happen because we’re in this together.”