I went from bussing tables at a restaurant
to basically going on a world tour doing my latte art,
and it just becoming exponentially successful.
(upbeat music)
I'm Michael Breach, and I am a latte artist.
I have always identified with art,
and it's always been a part of who I am.
Even when I was a young child, I was always drawing.
It's almost like the world just said,
"You're gonna be an artist. That's what you do."
My business started as a hobby.
It was just something I did at work for fun.
I was a barista at a hotel in Manhattan.
One night, it was sort of an accident,
I made a little latte art heart,
and the heart was a bit off,
so I sort of just drew a little face
in it using a bar skewer.
And when I went to post it on Facebook,
it tagged it as a person.
So I sort of had this light bulb go off in my head.
The first thing I did is go on GoDaddy and buy baristart.com
because I had a good feeling.
I did a video, and this video went viral online.
And, overnight, I get emails from people.
It was like Today Show and Good Morning America.
And, at that time, I'm sleeping on my friend's couch.
And all of this stuff happened to me really fast overnight.
(upbeat music)
At first, it was very difficult
to actually find my audience.
I thought my audience would be baristas, coffee people,
but funny enough, those were the people
that liked my work the least.
I had a lot of people saying,
"Why would you waste your time doing art on this foam?"
But I had 20,000 people following me at that time
saying, "This is great. You should keep doing this."
It made people happy.
That's sort of kinda what kept me going with it.
I think GoDaddy helped put a level of trust
into what I was doing,
having that professionalism out there
in the way that my work is presented.
I had all this overnight success,
but I did not actually make a living doing it.
One night, I got an email from someone.
It was my first email and I was so excited.
There was a brand out in Australia,
and they actually flew me out there for two weeks.
The next thing that happened,
I get an email from Prada or something,
and then they flew me to Denmark,
flew me to South Africa, all around Scandinavia.
I did, basically, a world tour.
So I am doing a virtual event here.
I'm gonna be making Katie's portrait.
The main way that I do it is sort of a method of latte art
that people call "poke and drag," which they take the dark,
and they use that as a pigment into the light.
Half the battle of doing good portraiture
is finding that picture of them that looks like them.
Someone's most distinguishing feature could just be
this little wrinkle in the side of their nose.
Getting the eyebrows right is really important.
So right now, I just got done drawing her face.
And I'm just gonna do the hairline here.
- [Katie] Oh, those curls! Give them to me in real life.
- My favorite thing about what I do is the fact
that I can actually make them very intricate.
And a lot of that just comes from
inventing and creating as I go.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
I will have clients that want certain things.
"Can you do this in all color?
Can you do three cups together?"
A lot of times, I don't necessarily know how to do it,
but I will say yes because they needed that out of me
and I made it happen.
I started out 2020 very hopeful,
and then, all of the sudden, everything was canceled.
For a moment there, I mean,
I was genuinely scared for my career.
I didn't really know what I was going to do.
Having GoDaddy wanting to work with me on my site,
it sort of lifted me out of that funk.
They did a really great job at helping me
sort of filter out what to do with my business
and how to categorize what I can offer to clients.
My website is my brick-and-mortar store.
So that's like someone going into my shop and being like,
"We're gonna give you some really nice furniture."
Having people that I could call anytime and ask for advice
has been very, very helpful to me.
I'm a latte artist. I'm not a website designer.
I may not be where I am now, being able to still do this
and do commissions and do virtual events
and things like that, had I not had that encouragement.
To me, to be an entrepreneur is being
in charge of your own destiny in a way.
I'm still striving. I still wanna be successful.
It's sort of like this circle that feeds itself.
Tomorrow or the next day, I could be experimenting
and come up with a whole different method of what I do,
and come up with designs that I've
never been able to do before.
And to me, I think that is the most exciting thing about it.
(upbeat music)