I am not your typical coffee expert.
I am a Spanish woman who has lived on three continents, taught herself SEO before most people knew what a webpage was, built and sold multiple businesses across completely different industries, and spent 15 years inside the coffee industry helping hundreds of people build their own brands across the USA, Europe, and the Middle East.
As featured by ICEX — Spain’s official international trade body — and Alibaba.com as a real-world case study in international B2B e-commerce strategy. Read the article here.
This is the honest version of how all of this happened.
A Childhood That Never Stayed Still
I was born in Spain, but I have never been very good at staying in one place.
As a young child I lived in Brighton, England for a year. Then my family moved to Tripoli, Libya, where I spent 13 formative years attending an American school — with two brief returns to Spain in between. That is where my English comes from. Not from classes or certificates, but from living it every day inside a genuinely international environment surrounded by children from dozens of different countries and cultures.
At 17 I returned to Madrid. At 18 or 19 I followed my Argentine boyfriend to Buenos Aires — and stayed for 13 years.
By the time I was 30 I had lived in Spain, England, Libya, and Argentina. I had studied in four different educational systems, absorbed four completely different cultures, and become genuinely comfortable operating in environments where I was always slightly the outsider. I also felt a particular connection to the Middle East from my years in Libya — a region that would later become one of my most important markets in the coffee business.
Looking back, this international upbringing was the best possible preparation for a career that would eventually take me from Colombian coffee farms to Spanish roasteries to Italian factories to clients across three continents. I did not plan any of it. I just followed the obsession wherever it led.
The Obsession That Explains Everything
A few years ago I was diagnosed with functional Asperger’s syndrome.
Functional means exactly what it sounds like — I am a perfectly normal person with no speech or behaviour impediments. What it does mean is that I am extremely solitary and I become obsessively focused on whatever I am working on to a degree that most people find difficult to understand.
Looking back, it explains my entire life.
Every business I have ever built, every industry I have ever entered, every skill I have ever developed — I learned by throwing myself into it completely. Reading everything. Testing everything. Failing. Adjusting. Refusing to stop until I understood it better than almost anyone around me.
That is not a boast. It is simply the most honest explanation of how one person ends up with the breadth of experience I am about to describe.
Buenos Aires — Learning To Outwork Everyone
In Buenos Aires I started working as a catwalk model. I hated almost every moment of it. While everyone else was networking and air-kissing I was sitting in the corner reading a book waiting for my turn on the runway. I quit because I wanted to build something real.
I talked my way into a teaching position at the largest business school in Buenos Aires with no teaching certification and no prior experience — just the honest conviction that I would outwork everyone on a staff of thirty teachers. Within a few years I was the top teacher. Then coordinator. Then training centre director. Then director of the entire school. Then I bought it.
I sold it four years later. The stress was giving me a stomach ulcer every single day and I knew I needed to change direction completely.
The Internet, Hair Removal, and 36 Websites on Page One of Google
While running a hostel we had opened in Buenos Aires, I had a conversation with a guest who casually mentioned he was selling permanent hair removal machines on an online marketplace. This was around 25 years ago — when most people had barely heard of webpages and almost nobody was talking about SEO.
I became obsessed.
I hired one of my teachers to sit beside me and explain how websites worked. Then I taught myself SEO entirely through trial, error, and relentless experimentation. I built my first website, got it to the first page of Google, and kept going.
At our peak we had 36 websites ranking on the first or second page of Google for hair removal related searches. We became the online leader in our niche and maintained that position for approximately 15 years — until Amazon entered the market and slowly dismantled everything we had built.
That experience gave me something no course or certificate could — 25 years of real SEO practice with real money on the line. Every coffee website you find on the first page of Google today is built on that foundation.
Spain, A Celebration Venue, and A Chance Conversation
When we closed the hostel we moved to Spain and continued the hair removal business until Amazon made it unsustainable. I pivoted again — this time opening a celebration venue in Spain.
If you have never tried to open a licensed events venue in Spain, consider yourself fortunate. Four thick folders of bureaucracy, endless permits, inspections, and paperwork that seemed to multiply every week. I was doing the work of five people with one employee and temporary staff for events. We were fully booked every weekend for months in advance — and still could not generate enough weekday business to make the numbers work sustainably.
That young employee had a boyfriend who was working in the Colombian coffee business. He knew my background in SEO and online sales. He came to me with a proposition.
And that is how coffee found me.
15 Years Inside The Coffee Industry
What followed was the most intense learning experience of my life — and I say that having already built businesses across multiple industries and three continents.
I started by trying to create my own coffee brand sourcing directly from Colombia. It was, in my own words, mission impossible. The complexity of sourcing, quality control, export documentation, and logistics across continents with a product I was still learning nearly broke me. I worked on it obsessively for a year and a half. I lost money. I made expensive mistakes. And I learned things that no book, course, or consultant had ever told me.
During this period I also worked extensively with Alibaba.com, sourcing coffee related products and equipment. My experience and results were significant enough that in 2021 I was invited to participate as a real-world case study in an official ICEX and Alibaba.com webinar on international B2B e-commerce strategy — speaking alongside the Alibaba.com Country Manager for Spain and Portugal and the CEO of ICEX. You can read the full article here.
I regrouped. I visited roasters across Spain until I found one in Alicante whose coffee and whose owner I genuinely believed in. Because I already had coffee websites ranking on the first page of Google, we reached an agreement — I would handle his international sales, he would give me deep access to the production side of the business. It was the education I needed and could not have found anywhere else.
From there the work expanded. I partnered with a coffee company in Torino, Italy, doing the same thing. Over 15 years I helped create private label coffee brands for clients across the USA, Europe, and the Middle East. I learned export documentation, sanitary certificates, country specific labelling requirements, packaging regulations, supplier negotiation, and the real costs that nobody ever mentions upfront.
I have seen hundreds of people try to start a coffee brand. Most of them shared one belief that cost them dearly — that the hardest part was creating a beautiful bag and filling it with coffee.
It is actually the easiest part. The hard part is everything nobody tells you about.
The Brands I Built For Myself
Along the way I created two coffee brands of my own that never fully launched — not because they were not good, but because creating has always come more naturally to me than selling my own creations.
Tony the Donkey is a specialty mystery coffee concept featuring rare micro and nano lot coffees from around the world, roasted by Italian artisanal roasters since 1950. Each bag contains a surprise origin revealed by QR code, with a comic strip telling the story of Tony’s adventurous journey to find it. It is one of the most original coffee brand concepts I have ever seen — and I created it myself.
40 Granos is another brand concept I developed with its own distinct identity and vision.
I also spent years curating hundreds of professional coffee bag designs created with a top Ukrainian designer — exploring what private label packaging could look like at its most creative and beautiful. Packaging design has always been the part of this business I love most deeply.
Why I Built This Site
I built MyOwnCoffeeBrand.com because I have seen too many genuinely motivated people lose money, lose time, and lose confidence trying to start a coffee brand without the right information.
Not generic information copied from other websites. Not theory written by someone who has never set foot inside a roastery or negotiated with a supplier or dealt with a customs problem at 11pm before a client deadline.
Real information. From someone who has been inside the factories, signed the contracts, handled the export paperwork, managed the packaging crises, and helped real brands launch in real markets across three continents.
I lost money learning this the hard way. I watched hundreds of others do the same. I do not want that to be your story.
Coffee is a genuinely beautiful business — if you follow the right steps and go in with your eyes open.
I am here to help you do exactly that.
Khansaa Ruiz
Coffee Industry Consultant — Private Label Specialist — SEO Expert
📍 Madrid, Spain
🔗 Connect with me on LinkedIn
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