The Nomad S5: Tempest-Jody Larrichia

The success secret of Tempest-Jody Larrichia, Chief Marketing Officer at Flash Coffee? Inquisitiveness.

For many people who have lived in multiple countries, every place feels like part of home, yet home is also nowhere. Tempest-Jody Larrichia is one of those people. In an interview conducted across a seven-hour time difference, he shared his perspective: from his experience, you either love moving around and become addicted to it, or you struggle with it and gravitate toward home because it feels familiar.

Currently based in Singapore—the eighth country he has lived in, just before turning 44—Larrichia observes both striking cultural differences and surprising similarities. He credits his upbringing for his open-mindedness and adaptability.

“I grew up in a household where my dad’s family is Italian, my mum’s family is Canadian. We lived in a house that never really felt entirely British, yet we were raised in one of the most traditionally English parts of England, within a Catholic faith. So, I never quite felt like we belonged. We were also really lucky growing up; we had homes in France and Spain, so we were constantly travelling and experiencing different cultures. I always felt a sense of being ‘other.’ Today, people call that a ‘third culture’ experience,” he reflects.

From Los Angeles and Istanbul to Zurich, Bangkok, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Italy, Larrichia considers himself fortunate to have immersed himself in diverse cultures, religions, and communities. This exposure has shaped both his career and personal identity, equipping him with the ability to understand, navigate, and adapt to new environments with ease.

“I still have so many places I want to live—South America is on my list. I'd love to go back and explore North America again. There are countless places in Europe and Asia I still want to experience,” he says.

Over the years, he has learned to split his heart across multiple places at once, but for Larrichia, the challenges of adapting to new cultures are part of the joy.

What have you been up to?

I mean, what have I been up to… that’s a really broad question! And kind of date-specific, right? But yeah, right now, I’m based in Singapore and working for our business in Indonesia. So I kind of super-commute from Singapore to Jakarta every week, which is a bit of a beast to travel. But honestly, I love being next to the team and close to our customers. So that’s full of joy.

Right now, specifically, we’re opening the first in a series of an entirely new direction for our business with new stores here in Indonesia.

If you had to describe yourself in just three words, what would they be?
Energetic. Restless. Perfectionist.

I have deep hyperactivity and, yes, OCD. But I see both of those as skill sets, especially in a creative field. They’ve been crucial in driving my career forward—this never-ending energy to keep going, combined with a relentless need for everything to look and feel perfect. That’s what keeps pushing me forward.”

How has your nomadic journey influenced your marketing approach?

That’s an interesting one. Firstly, growing up in a multicultural household helped immensely. I’ve always been obsessed with history, research, and learning—it’s just a part of who I am.

I was also incredibly fortunate during my college years. Fiona Hickman Taylor, one of my professors, played a huge role in shaping my career. I studied interior design under her, and she completely blew my brain. She introduced me to screen printing, etching, lino printing—things that, at the time, didn’t seem directly relevant to interior design but ultimately helped me understand process, craft, and the origins of ideas.

She reinforced the notion that to truly grasp creativity, you have to understand everything. Even when you think an idea is entirely your own, there’s always a germ of an idea from somewhere.

At university, I had another lecturer, Camilla, who led our architecture program. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of architecture and art history, which she integrated deeply into our curriculum. That exposure to history, theory, and cultural narratives shaped the way I think and approach creativity.

As I expanded my career internationally, working in different markets with diverse clientele, these foundational lessons became even more critical. I’ve worked across industries—F&B, banking, couture, fashion, sports, and FMCG. I’ve sold $100,000 gowns to A-list celebrities and $2.99 T-shirts to people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. I feel equally blessed for both experiences.

But I think my background—the core of my education pathway, my family pathway, living in so many countries—has been key to understanding how to sell to those people.

Irrespective of their economic power, irrespective of where they are, their religion, their colour, their race—I’ve been very fortunate to be able to dive under the skin of what makes people tick. And I think that’s been core to my success.

It’s about integrating cultural insights and using them to craft strategies that resonate. I can confidently say something will work for a customer because my background has given me the ability to understand them—sometimes before they even understand themselves.

Flash Coffee had to shut down 11 stores in Singapore, but it now operates 67 stores and has reported new revenue per store in Indonesia. How would you reflect on the role of marketing and branding in driving this success?

A core part of any brand’s growth is learning—and failing. And failures, of course, are painful.

Our target customer—Gen Z and young-minded consumers—has evolved dramatically over the past five years. The 19-to-24 age bracket experiences rapid change, arguably more than any other demographic.

We faced tough lessons, but the key was adapting quickly. We shifted gears rapidly to align with our customers and the changing market.

The world is much noisier now than in 2019—post-pandemic, with ongoing wars across multiple continents and geopolitical tensions rising in the East Philippine Sea (or the South China Sea, depending on your take) and around Taiwan. We’ve also seen once untouchable tech giants, like Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple, making massive layoffs.

We responded by doubling down on Indonesia, refining our focus there while transitioning Thailand into a franchise market. We exited markets where the path to profitability would have taken too long. It’s not that they weren’t profitable—it’s that they would have taken too long to get there.

The core part of marketing a brand in that journey has been to reposition the brand in today’s shifting consumer landscape. So, again—making sure we’re creating environments that feel calmer for our customers. Creating environments where our customer wants to sit and stay. Whereas before, we were building outlets in a pandemic—largely delivery-focused.

You only have to look at companies like Deliveroo or Delivery Hero to see how the market evolved. Everyone built into that stratospheric growth then had to pivot as behaviours changed.

I think the core messaging from marketing and brand has been about repositioning: learning from the customers; learning from other markets where maybe certain branding moments didn’t resonate; and making sure that we’ve hyper-fragmented the way we communicate promotions, products, and services. We’re talking to our customers wherever they are about the products they really want and the ones that matter to them. That’s been a huge part of that learning.

Flash Coffee is a tech-powered company, and in a piece for World Coffee Portal, you mentioned that technology plays a key role in fostering strong in-person brand connections. With so many digital touchpoints available today, how do you balance the digital and physical aspects of customer experience to create a seamless, cohesive brand journey?

It’s a tough challenge because if we look at brands like McDonald’s, they have been at the forefront of self-service kiosks and automation, or Starbucks, which has revolutionised the app experience.

But McDonald’s has pushed the kiosk approach so aggressively that human service has almost disappeared from their business.

On the other hand, Starbucks has recently admitted that they over-prioritised their app at the expense of human service. Their CEO has repeatedly stated that they are working to correct this balance. In a way, we’ve preempted this shift—so you could argue we’re ahead of Starbucks.

Flash Coffee was built on an app-first, tech-driven proposition in a market—Southeast Asia—that wasn’t initially app-first. When we launched, we were one of the pioneers in rethinking customer experience with a digital-first approach.

Since then, we’ve adjusted our strategy. We’re now investing more in in-person service, opening larger stores, and fostering a more human-centric customer experience. But that doesn’t mean the tech side is being abandoned.

Behind the scenes, we’ve been refining and evolving our app. We’re about to launch a major new proposition. A sister brand of ours—CATA—is developing a completely new digital experience. It’s a rich, social, video-first app journey.

It will showcase coffee-making processes, trace the bean-to-cup journey, and display products in rich, 3D visuals. We’re drawing inspiration from the fashion industry—how they create immersive e-commerce experiences—and applying those principles to coffee.

So while we’re doubling down on physical service, we’re also doubling down on tech. Later this year—by Q2—you’ll see a radically new approach from Flash Coffee, one that positions us at the cutting edge of the market with a fresh, fashion-forward way of communicating our product.

The app isn’t just the first step in the customer journey—it’s also the last. There’s so much untapped potential during that ‘last mile’ when a customer is waiting for their order. People instinctively watch the tracking icon move on their screen. That’s a crucial opportunity for storytelling—bringing customers into our world, engaging them, and even encouraging further purchases.

Many brands overlook this, but with CATA, we’re set to place ourselves at the heart of that process.

How has your experience in retail design influenced your approach to branding and customer engagement in a very much digital-first world at the moment?

The first principle of physical design is understanding what you’re actually selling.

It’s easy to say, “We’re selling T-shirts” or “We’re selling coffee, so we need tables and chairs.” But many brands forget the customer—and that’s surprising.

Take the new Vans store on Oxford Street in London. They’ve installed a skate ramp in the middle of the store. But realistically, who’s bringing a skateboard down Oxford Street? Almost no one. Still, it reinforces the brand’s connection with its audience and reminds customers why they fell in love with Vans in the first place.

When I was at Puma, one of our biggest strategic shifts was defining what the brand truly stood for and aligning the store experience with those values. We wanted customers to feel connected to Puma, whether through the iconic Puma cat logo, the use of natural textures like wood, or an atmosphere that made the brand come alive. Unfortunately, the brand has since moved away from that vision, and today, many of the stores feel like soulless black-and-white boxes. As a creative, I can’t help but critique that.

Another major aspect that brands often miss is the art of localisation. I say “art” because many companies approach it as a mere checkbox exercise. Take Primark, for instance. In their Madrid store, they slap a “Primark Loves Madrid” sign behind the counter and call it a day..

At Puma, we went deeper. In London, we transformed our store into a series of British telephone boxes that customers stepped inside to place orders. In Madrid, we created a Bavarian ski lodge aesthetic. In Osaka, I helped design a staircase that remains one of my proudest projects—it mimicked Japan’s rice terraces while doubling as a dynamic product display.

At Flash Coffee, we’ve taken a similar approach. The bright yellow box aesthetic is gone. Now, our stores have a warmer, more natural feel. We’ve refocused on our customers, incorporating wooden elements to reflect Indonesia’s rich natural landscape, adding greenery to connect with the local flora, and using granite tones inspired by Indonesia’s volcanic terrain.

Most customers won’t consciously register these details—but they’ll feel them. The emotional connection will be there, even if they can’t pinpoint why. That’s the key to great design: weaving in geography, socioeconomics, and cultural context in a way that feels intuitive rather than forced.

When integrating technology into a physical space, it’s crucial that it doesn’t feel intrusive. Too many brands just plonk a screen in the middle of a store and call it “digital integration.”

At Flash Coffee, we’re taking a different approach. While we have digital screens, QR code payments, and table ordering, we’re not forcing customers to engage with them. Instead, we’re allowing them to choose how they interact.

For instance, when you’re sitting at a table, waiting for a friend, and feeling bored, you might scan a QR code out of curiosity. That’s where we introduce them to our digital world—on their terms, through their own device.

The key is to constantly surprise and engage the customer so that every visit feels fresh.

What advice would you give to marketers looking to build cross-cultural expertise today?

There are a few things that I can't nail down to one.

I guess the biggest part is to be inquisitive. And I say that by meaning that read the newspaper, read the financial press, read political biographies, and read backgrounds.

Why do I say that instead of going straight to creativity? That's easy to say, “Oh, I'm creative, or I know every trend that's on social media right now” but like I said before, everything comes from somewhere.

Everything can be drawn from a moment and I think it's really important to understand cultural backgrounds. It's really important to read both sides of stories, you know, why world wars happened, what happened 100 years ago on a continent, to understand why we're here today.

Take the Russian Revolution. Its impact is still being felt in modern Europe, particularly in the context of the war in Ukraine.

Look at Soviet graphic design—it emerged as a reaction against the excesses of the Romanovs. It was about forging a dynamic, forward-thinking identity for a nation in turmoil.

Consider Bauhaus—it was a response to the collapse of empires and an attempt to build a streamlined, modern world.

Even the 1980s Memphis design movement wasn’t just about aesthetics. Its bright colours and bold forms reflected the excesses of Wall Street, the rise of Versace, and a culture obsessed with wealth and status.

Or take 2007—who could have foreseen that a mortgage crisis in middle America would have blown apart the world economy in 2007, leading to two lost decades of economic and creative stagnation.

Who could have foreseen that even a small virus like HM51 bird flu would have precipitated the Asian economic collapse in the mid-2000s. There are these kinds of tiny economic moments that it's really easy as creators to say, well, that's not creative. But all of these things actually influence creativity every single day, so it's really important to understand them and how they impact culture.

It's really important to understand political history because we repeat ourselves again and again and again. All of those things bubble up. So I would say be inquisitive and don't just be inquisitive about creative, but be inquisitive about everything that's going on in the world because it all has a place and it does affect you.

The other part would be to make sure you listen and you learn. Perhaps somewhat controversially, I think – as somebody born in the West – lots of people in the West, especially creatives, especially people from the tech world, come with a sense of arrogance that everything in the West is the best idea, democracy in the West is better than democracy in Asia or in the Middle East. The biggest part is don't have an ego, right? Or the sense of imbued arrogance. Just because you've come from somewhere, it doesn’t mean that your way is the right way.

If you stop and listen and you're inquisitive, you'll always hear a viewpoint that will challenge your creativity and make you a better creative.

What are you looking forward to in 2025?

Obviously, we have our store launches—so we’ve got six in slate now, and it’s been the culmination of, like, two and a half years of deep work.

I think, honestly, for a large part of my career, I’ve been a part of a creative team, and now I look after everything, right?

Now I look after retail design, marketing, and a hand in product ranging—I design the merch with my team—social media, CRM campaigns.

So for the first time in my career, I control every aspect of the way a brand looks, feels, talks, shows up, promotes, and becomes commercial.

And so for me, personally, that’s the most exciting part about 2025—it’s that drive.

Of course, for our brand and for our fellow team members at Flash Coffee, I’m most excited about our six new stores because they are the beginning of an entirely new change for the brand, you know, and my team and the team I work with are at the forefront of every single one of those changes, and I can’t wait to see my team grow.

And I guess, mostly as well, because there’s lots of change coming at Flash Coffee that I’m really excited about. I can’t wait to see where I am in a year’s time because I feel like it’s gonna be a really different place.