I'm a 30-something book nerd originally from New York, currently living in Chicago. I've been an artist my entire life — and I have a very wide, slightly chaotic array of interests to show for it. Pottery and ceramics. Biology, specifically genetics. Fountain pens. The Harlem Renaissance, which is by far my favorite time period to learn about. The history and evolution of graffiti. And coffee — I am in fact obsessed with coffee and need it to function most days. Between the tattoos, the ink, and the random splotches of color everywhere, we are fully inked up over here. The name was never an accident.
In the simplest terms: I just want to tell good stories, make bold strokes, and drink great coffee. If that's all you needed to know, it's been wonderful having you. If you want to go a little deeper — keep reading.
The Coffee Ink Studio didn't start with a business plan. It started with a feeling that the kind of life I want to live begins and ends with a book. That stories matter. That creativity isn't a hobby or a side project — it's a way of being in the world. I just wanted to put my art on little things that bring me joy on a daily basis, and hopefully do the same for you.
Yes, this is a Black woman-owned company. I just wanted to say that plainly, the way it deserves to be said. I LOVE US. And I've been privileged enough to see that there is no specific or "right" way to be a Black person. Like Carlton Banks said: "Black isn't something I'm trying to be, it's what I am." That's a true sentiment for most people and cultures. There are plenty of things widely associated with your identity that you simply don't connect with, and that's not a contradiction. That's just being a fully realized human being. I find the world around me endlessly inspiring — but it's the almost mundane moments in a person's individual story that really make my creative spirit soar. There is such beauty in the small things that make life worth remembering. That's what I'm striving to capture.
I've spent a lot of time not feeling like I had the right to take up space in the important conversations. To be super honest, I've never really felt like my voice was unique, or educated, or eloquent enough to really matter. While it brings untold joy to see so much more diverse representation in the world now, I still want to see more — more fully realized, complex human beings who happen to be a person of color, who have nothing to do with the expected narrative. So this studio is me daring to take up space in the world as just my weird, quirky, unapologetic self. And I hope it gives you a little permission (not that you need it) to do the same.
The brand has been rebuilt more than once. Not because it failed — because it kept not feeling like the right thing. There's a difference. Every version taught something, every restart got more specific, and specific is where it finally got interesting. Every product is made with intention, every decision is deliberate, and the process is honest — even when it's messy. Growth built by hand, for real.
What The Coffee Ink Studio actually is right now: a story-driven art brand creating illustrated lifestyle products for people who are intentionally building something — a business, a creative practice, a life that actually fits you. The journals, the stationery, the small goods — they aren't just products. They're tools that hold your process. Records of your progress.
And that's phase one. Because the longer vision is a creative production studio — one that makes animated films for adults, because cartoons are not just for kids and this storytelling medium deserves to be treated as such. Adaptations that embrace and celebrate the source material instead of changing everything that made the original worth reading. Publishing that lifts minority voices — not just people of color, but disabled people, and the minorities within minorities that the mainstream still hasn't figured out how to see. Every product that comes out of this studio is building reputation and trust toward that. By the time the studio exists, you'll already know what to expect from it.
Four years in the making. I'm not the same person who started this — I know more, I want things more specifically, and I'm done waiting until it feels perfect. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. I'm looking forward to having a ton of fun with you. And I hope you unapologetically take up every bit of space you deserve in your own life too.
Create by any means necessary.
— Chan