Find out which stores have opened, closed or moved and what’s new in Berkeley’s nonprofit, retail and small-business communities. If you have updates to share, send an email to editors@berkeleyside.org.
Shop Talk
- WorkBistro becomes Sway, leasing event space instead of desks
- Dark Water founder jogged her way into new tattoo studio space
- Center for Youth Development through Law celebrates 25 years of educating and empowering
- Siamese Dream says goodbye, again, to their Shattuck Avenue location
- Cooperative Center Federal Credit Union plans a merger
- Biz Buzz: City launches new online portal for business licenses; music nonprofit 924 Gilman Street raises funds for improvements
In the Spotlight West Berkeley
WorkBistro becomes Sway, leasing event space instead of desks
Two years after Adam Goldstein moved his co-working company, WorkBistro, around the corner from University Avenue to San Pablo, he found himself at a crossroads of a different sort.
The co-working angle wasn’t working so well. It was hard for WorkBistro to compete with local coffee shops, where for the price of a latte, people could get a workspace and Wi-Fi for an entire day.
But then people started approaching Goldstein asking if they could use the WorkBistro space for events — company meetings, birthday parties, even wedding receptions.
Goldstein started hosting events and soon was doing 10 to 15 per month.
And then it hit him. WorkBistro was no longer a co-working company. It was an events company.
Goldstein quickly realized that the WorkBistro name no longer fit the new company and, after some workshopping with friends, landed on Sway.
“To me it elicits movement, fluidity, and this openness that it can really be whatever you need it to be,” said Goldstein.
That “whatever you need it to be” ethos is part of Goldstein’s business strategy. He’s developed a long list of local vendors who can provide food, photography, music, yoga instruction, you name it.
And more recently he started working with other local venues. The San Pablo Avenue space has its limitations; it’s too small for some groups, too large for others.
“Or they don’t like our aesthetic or they don’t like the neighborhood or they don’t like the fact that there’s no parking lot,” Goldstein said, “And so what we realized was we can actually take Sway out of the box.”
His company now offers event space at Dharma College in downtown Berkeley and at Ciel Creative Space on Eighth Street. Sway also works with locations in Oakland and San Francisco, and they’re in the process of launching a partnership with Cafenated Coffee, which has two locations in Berkeley.
His business model involves offering the space as well as catering and other amenities.
Sway hosts a variety of events, from work retreats to conferences, from baby showers to celebrations of life. They also offer all-inclusive “Sway Day” packages for work teams that starts with coffee and a breakfast buffet and ends with cocktails and a live DJ set.
And Goldstein says he is flexible and open to other, more unusual, event experiences, too.
“Somebody once brought in dancing poles into the space and hosted a pole dancing workshop,” Goldstein said. “That was a pretty interesting one.”
Sway, 2043 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley. Phone: 650-713-2974. Connect via Instagram.
Open West Berkeley
Dark Water founder jogged her way into new tattoo studio space
Tattoo artist Katie Mizuno prepares for a tattoo session like an athlete.
She makes sure to get eight hours of sleep on nights before tattooing days, and she takes her hydration seriously — you’ll rarely see her without her 46-ounce Yeti thermos full of ice water.
“She treats it like a sport almost, the way she fuels and rests for her tattooing,” said her husband, Kento Mizuno.
A high school athlete who ran track and was captain of the basketball team, Katie still runs everyday. And it was on one of her daily jogs that she found the space that eventually became Dark Water, a tattoo studio the Mizunos opened in November on San Pablo Avenue.
“I have a bunch of different running routes throughout the Bay Area,” Katie said. “It was a great way of looking at different retail spaces that had ‘for lease’ signs on them, and I happened upon this one.”
The space she happened upon is located next door to Babette, the previous home of Lanesplitter Pizza. Lanesplitter founders, Daniel Rogers and Vic Gumper, who own the building, were working on the space when the Mizunos went to take a closer look. Rogers and Gumper told the couple that they had envisioned a tattoo shop in the space.
“It was too perfect,” Kento said. “The next day, we put down a deposit.”
A video Katie posted on Instagram shows the couple prepping their new space, kicking up dust, clearly exhausted. It’s called, “Watch this couple open their small business … and nearly lose their minds.”
Dark Water opened in November and currently has a roster of six artists, including Katie. Kento, who also works as a designer and photographer, takes care of “everything that’s not tattooing,” including working with contractors to build out the shop, maintaining supplies, artist outreach, and social media.
Katie was born in San Francisco, but grew up in Boulder, Colorado. She studied film production at NYU, which helped her figure out her artistic strengths, and also set the stage for her future as a tattoo artist.
“I did a lot of special effects makeup in film school,” she said, “which kind of helped me learn how to draw on bodies and work with bodies.” New York is also where she got tattooed for the first time.
“A good friend of mine was also getting into tattoos, and we kind of fueled each other’s addiction to it,” said Katie.
After college she lived for a spell in Japan where she taught kindergarten. It’s also where she and Kento first met.
Kento grew up in Japan, but at the time of their meeting was attending design school in the U.S.
“We went on one date in Tokyo, and then did long distance for like six months,” said Kento.
During their time apart, Katie started sharing her drawings with Kento.
“She would send me sketches, and I’d be like, ‘These are really freaking good. Someone who’s talented like you should pursue this,’” said Kento.
Katie couldn’t imagine making a living as an artist, it seemed too far-fetched, but Kento had planted a seed. “Once the idea was planted in my head it grew and grew until I realized I didn’t want to do anything else,” said Katie.
So she set out to learn how to tattoo, and did so the hard way, by tattooing on herself.
“Katie tattooed her whole legs and she was like, ‘Well, I’m not going to ask someone else to sacrifice their skin to learn how to do this,” said Kento.
Some of the tattoos were not so great, but some of them were good. And the good ones eventually got her hired at a tattoo shop in San Francisco.
Over the next eight years she worked at “a ton of different shops,” including stints in Pendleton, South Carolina, and Austin, Texas, where she honed her skills and learned about the industry.
Through it all she always had the goal of opening her own shop.
Katie likes to do large tattoos. Full arm sleeves, large back pieces, bodysuits. Her signature style is “suminagashi,” which translates into “ink flow.”
“Like flowing lines that influence each other,” she said. “There’s like a push and pull motion to it. It’s a very water-like texture, which also kind of made sense with the naming of the shop.”
Other artists at the shop specialize in smaller, fine-line pieces.
Those different styles are spotlighted in a video Katie created for Instagram, where she and a co-worker, who work in completely different styles, have a tattoo-gun stand-off while the theme for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” plays. They glare at each other before breaking into smiles and blowing kisses across the studio.
“Those videos are like my film degree being put to work,” she said.
Other videos range from the informative (“My favorite topics on tattoo history”), to the absurd (“Do I dare show my feet on social media again?”), to the poignant (“3 things tattoo artists know to be true: 1. Literally everyone has stretch marks, 2. Self harm scars are extremely common, 3. Societal standards of beauty are overrated”).
“I would like people to find those videos and see my work and think to themselves, ‘I wonder if I could sit through it and become more curious about the process and also feel a little bit more accepted,’” Katie said. “I tattoo all body types, all skin tones, so I would hope that people would feel more invited into the process by seeing those videos and relating to them.”
Dark Water, 2035 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley. Hours: Daily, 12 p.m.-7 p.m. Connect via Instagram.
In the Spotlight Central Berkeley
Center for Youth Development through Law celebrates 25 years of educating and empowering
When Nancy Schiff went to law school, it wasn’t to become a lawyer. The founder of Berkeley’s Center for Youth Development through Law was more interested in public policy, advocacy and education.
She developed a plan to teach high school students about law and policy, and a quarter-century later, her Summer Legal Fellowship Program has graduated more than 700 youth from Berkeley, Oakland and Richmond. Most have gone on to attend college.
“I imagined doing maybe legislative advocacy or working for a nonprofit,” said Schiff who graduated from UC Law San Francisco, formerly UC Hastings College of the Law. “But not doing traditional law. And education was one of my strong interests.”
She started working with a program based out of the University of San Francisco School of Law called the Street Law Project, which educated high school students about their legal rights. Most of the students were from disadvantaged backgrounds and many had had encounters with the legal system that weren’t entirely positive.
“It was empowering for the students to learn about law.” said Schiff. “But then we wanted to go beyond that.”
She and her colleagues envisioned a summer program where students could get paid internships working in law and social justice offices, take classes on a college campus, and learn about careers in law “more in depth and more first hand.”
Schiff developed curriculum, sought out law offices and nonprofit organizations that could offer summer internships, and reached out to Eleanor Swift, the Dean of UC Berkeley Law School, who offered the use of the school’s classrooms during the summer.
The result was the Center for Youth Development through Law (CYDL), a nonprofit Schiff founded with others in 1999, that is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
“The students are from communities where their parents didn’t go to college and they’re facing a lot of barriers that make it harder,” Schiff said. “We are inspiring and preparing the students for higher education and meaningful careers, as well as for civic engagement and leadership.”
Students who have participated in the program have gone on to work in law, education, law enforcement, government administration, restorative justice, and social services. Many alumni come back and teach classes or give talks at CYDL’s summer program at UC Berkeley. CYDL partners with Berkeley Law, but is funded independently.
Dorian Peters was one of the first students to participate in the program in 2000. At the time he was attending Berkeley High School, where he had “very little focus and motivation,” according to a profile on CYDL’s website.
“I joined the Center for Youth Development through Law’s program because I wanted a paid summer job,” Peters said. “Little did I know, the program was much more than a summer job.”
The program motivated Peters to take classes at Diablo Valley College. He went on to graduate from UC Berkeley and then attended Vanderbilt Law School. He is now a Deputy Attorney General focusing on cyber crime. Peters currently serves on CYDL’s Leadership Council and teaches and mentors new students.
Schiff recalled another graduate, an undocumented student from Richmond, who is currently working in immigration law and is planning to go to law school.
“One year when we were going to get our funding cut off from a source in Richmond, he came and spoke publicly to some very powerful people, challenging them, and speaking in a compelling way about what he went through as a child and why this kind of program is necessary.” said Schiff.
Another graduate, Khiari Neal, attended the summer program in 2017. She then went to UCLA where she received a degree in sociology and will be a J.D. candidate at Berkeley Law this fall. She also serves on the CYDL Board.
“She comes to all of our events and speaks,” Schiff said. “She’s a great motivator of the younger students and speaks about her own challenges, about not feeling confident in herself, and how she worked through those struggles, and how she uses what she has learned to be a force for change.”
Schiff, who still serves as the organization’s Executive Director, took a beat and then added, “Given how much the alumni give back to the program, someday I can see one of them taking over the program from me.”
Center for Youth Development through Law, UC Berkeley School of Law, 225 Bancroft Way, #215 Law Building, Berkeley. Phone: 510-642-4520. Connect via Facebook and Instagram.
Closed North Shattuck
Siamese Dream says goodbye, again, to their Shattuck Avenue location
After announcing its closure in March 2023, only to reverse course after an outpouring of support from her customers and a renegotiated lease, Srisuda “Jay” Romero, has closed the Shattuck Avenue location of her store Siamese Dream for good.
The original Siamese Dream location, which Romero opened 20 years ago on College Avenue, will remain open.
“It’s hard for me to have two locations,” said Romero, 52, who had just returned from a trip to Thailand to visit her aging mother. “It’s better to have one and then I can go back and forth to see my mom, my family.”
Siamese Dream specializes in “funky and exotic clothing” made in Thailand, Nepal, and Bali, as well as jewelry and accessories.
The Shattuck location, which Romero ran for nearly 10 years, officially closed on Christmas Eve of 2023.
“It’s hard to let it go,” she said, “But when I let it go, it feels good.”
While closing the Shattuck location has given her more time to spend with her family, she doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Besides traveling extensively to Thailand, she also runs an online shop called The Buddha Garden that sells small Buddha and Kuan Yin statues, as well as Japanese incense, wall hangings and Tibetan singing bowls.
“I think it’s good to do two jobs,” she said. “One job is fun. One job is like a hobby for me.”
The Buddha Garden is a family affair – her husband takes photos and writes copy for the website, and her son, D’Angelo, helps run the online shop. Romero is hoping D’Angelo will take over the business one day.
She wants to help her son succeed, like her mother helped her.
“She’s a business woman,” Romero said of her mother. “She’s a single mom, worked hard. She trained me how to work as a kid, and how to be independent.”
But Romero’s real passion is talking with her customers, about their lives, about art, and especially about travel. You could say her third job is as a travel agent.
“When people want to go to Thailand, they have a question or they need help, they come to ask me,” she said.
Siamese Dream, 3180 College Ave., Berkeley. Phone: 510-428-9989. Hours: Monday-Friday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Connect via Facebook and Instagram.
In the Spotlight Southwest Berkeley
Cooperative Center Federal Credit Union plans a merger
The credit union that was originally created for members of the Berkeley Co-op grocery chain is merging with a Southern California financial institution amid a 40% drop in membership, its CEO said.
Cooperative Center Federal Credit Union, which was founded in Berkeley more than 80 years ago, is planning to merge with Nuvision Credit Union, a Southern California-based institution founded in 1935, pending a vote by members.
“As small Credit Unions everywhere would likely agree, there are significant operational challenges that are becoming more difficult to navigate with our limited resources (capital, net income, expertise, technology, regulatory compliance demands, and cyber security, to name just a few areas),” CEO Fadhila Holman said in a statement sent to Berkeleyside.
Cooperative Center Federal Credit Union was chartered in 1942 for members of Consumers Cooperative of Berkeley, known colloquially as the Berkeley Co-op or just the Co-op. At its height, the Co-op ran 12 grocery stores in the Bay Area, including three in Berkeley.
In the 1950s and ’60s, under the leadership of Zach Brown, the credit union was known for its progressive practices such as creating home loan programs for African Americans during the era of redlining. “We developed a program which was integrated racially and had very liberal and constructive programs for operations,” Brown said in a 1984 oral history.
The credit union is a Minority Depository and Community Development Financial Institution, which means 51% or more of the voting stock is held by minority individuals or a majority of the board is minority individuals and the institution serves a predominately minority community.
In the 1980s Cooperative Center Federal Credit Union merged with several other credit unions, including Cal Berkeley Credit Union, Alta Bates Credit Union, and Shaklee Credit Union Today, the credit union has over $135 million in assets and more than 7,500 members, according to the statement provided by Holman.
“Gentrification and the high costs of living and housing in the Bay area has contributed to a migration of where our members live and work.”
One member, Kathleen Labriola, is dubious about the merger.
In an email to Berkeleyside, Labriola wrote that the credit union “has been an alternative to the big banks, and has served the Berkeley community all these years, so it is mysterious as to why they are merging and are asking all their members to vote to approve this merger.”
Labriola also fears that the merger “could lead to the loss of our credit union which has been a vital community financial institution.”
Asked about members’ concerns, Holman said she believed that the merger was best for customers.
“We understand that change being inevitable does not mean that it is always well received,” said Holman in her statement.
Members have until March 14 to weigh in on the merger.
Cooperative Center Federal Credit Union, 3015 San Pablo Ave., Suite A, Berkeley. Phone: 510-845-6428. Hours: Monday to Friday, 9:30 a.m.-6 p.m. Connect via Facebook and Instagram.
In brief
Biz Buzz: City launches new online portal for business licenses; music nonprofit 924 Gilman Street raises funds for improvements
- Kim Carson, founder of the Berkeley-based nonprofit Parallax Futures, was a finalist for Black Tech Achievement’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award. The BTA Awards honor the achievements of African American technologists and “celebrate and acknowledge the Black role models and innovators within the tech sector.” Carson founded Parallax Futures in 2023. The organization’s goal is to “infuse the world with Conceptual Technologists,” their name for a new type of innovator possessing both technical expertise and creative and conceptual thinking.
- 924 Gilman Street, the nonprofit, all-ages music venue, recently raised $25,308 for their “Side Door Project,” which will replace their current single side door with double doors to make it safer to evacuate during an emergency. Installing new side doors is one of the venue’s “most long-standing put off projects,” according to a statement on the Kickstarter page created to raise the funds. “Our legal capacity is determined by our exits, and installing a new double door on the side wall will nearly double our legal capacity,” said the statement. The new doors will also make it easier for performing bands to load in and out of the venue.
- In January, the City of Berkeley launched a new online portal to make renewing business licenses easier for retailers, restaurants, landlords and most merchants. The portal automatically calculates taxes due and emails an unofficial business license the same day. Certain business categories, including construction, auto vehicles for hire, massage businesses and street vendors, cannot use the portal. And business licenses must have been paid in full the previous year to renew online. All Berkeley business licenses expire on Dec. 31 each year and must be renewed before March 1.
