Café Velvet

Ilse Geyskens founded Velvet in 2013 with a specific two-way premise: bringing Colombian coffee into Belgium and Belgian roasting culture into Colombia, rather than building a single-country import business. The company backs that premise with infrastructure on both ends, running a roastery in Jodoigne, Belgium, and a second roastery in Itagüí, part of the greater Medellín metropolitan area in Colombia, alongside a retail concept store on Rue Antoine Dansaert in Brussels. Her husband joined the business as master roaster in 2022, formalizing a family structure around the roasting side specifically. What distinguishes Velvet from most specialty coffee retailers is that it manages import and export directly rather than buying through a trading intermediary, sourcing green coffee straight from Colombian producers and handling the logistics of getting it to Belgium itself, a model the company contrasts explicitly with roasters who only import. That direct-trade structure also lets Velvet sell green beans to other professional roasters as a wholesale channel, in addition to its own retail and wholesale roasted coffee, giving the business three distinct revenue lines built around the same Colombia-to-Belgium supply chain rather than three unrelated product categories.