Nichole Tupas ran a daycare in California for more than a decade. Then she bought a vintage cocktail trailer, loaded up her four kids, and drove 2,500 miles to a city she had never once visited.
That was the plan. Charleston, sight unseen.
Four years later she owns two coffee shops with a third on the way.
Harlow and Pearl opened downtown on June 13 at 769 Meeting St., in a converted house with a pink-painted porch and purple walls decked in dollhouse decor. It followed an April opening inside the Starlight Motor Inn in North Charleston, tucked beneath the Burgundy Lounge, all black leather banquettes and laptops and strawberry coconut matchas.
The road there was harder than the drive.
While Tupas was building the brand at the Charleston Farmers Market, she was undergoing Stage 4 cancer treatment during the day and working nights at High Cotton. She ran out of money. She went back into the daycare business to fund the dream. Weeks later, the owners of Modern Manor, a Mount Pleasant boutique, needed someone to take over their in-store café and thought she'd fit.
Business was slow. Then a local influencer named Emma Roof posted a TikTok of a Lucky Charms latte with a miniature rubber duck floating on top.
"It was like the best thing that could have happened to us," Tupas told the Post & Courier.
That is the last four years of food and beverage compressed into one sentence. The lattes went everywhere. The Instagram following settled around 15,000. The Mount Pleasant space stopped being big enough.
What's interesting is that the aesthetic isn't the moat, and Tupas seems to know it.
"I think what we do really well is connecting with the customer," she said. "I think we really go out of our way to let everyone know we appreciate them."
Charleston's coffee landscape is crowded and getting more so. Plenty of shops have good beans and better design. Very few have a line of parents letting a barista spray edible glitter on a four-year-old's drink and treating it like an event.
The menu leans all the way into that: cosmic brownie lattes, banana pudding cold foam, cereal and Nilla wafers in little containers for garnish, weekly rotating flavors. It's not for everyone. It's aggressively for someone.
A third location is coming to Clements Ferry Road with an all-new look.
The Meeting Street shop runs 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily. The Rivers Avenue location, at 3245, opens 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Go early. The line on Meeting is real, and it does not care that it's raining.
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