In the heart of Seattle’s Pioneer Square, there’s a vintage-meets-café space that feels less like a store and more like being invited into someone’s living room — if that living room were curated by a dozen incredibly stylish friends and served nostalgic, artist-inspired lattes. Exhibit Coffee (located inside the Friend Museum) is more than a coffee shop or retail space, it’s a creative hub, a community living room, and a love letter to friendship, fashion, and good coffee.
Co-owners Mandi Avett and Ali Weber(and their four-legged greeter, Billie) have built something deeply intentional: a vintage marketplace with a stylist for every vibe, a coffee bar that pays tribute to grandmothers and girlhood, and a space where people can gather, create, and just be. In this interview, they share how it all came to life, the power of showing people off, and why shopping vintage and local is an act of resistance and joy.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Tell us about Exhibit Coffee and Friend Museum!
Mandi: Friend Museum was our first child. It stemmed from us working in local markets and just feeling like we thought there could be more of a retail space for that, and an environment where people could meet and create art together and build up community.
Ali: I think Exhibit Coffee came about very naturally and very quickly. We knew that we didn’t want to do vintage in a way that we’d seen it done before. It needed to be a community space. There’s room for everyone in vintage and that’s what we loved. And we also wanted a space for people to come that was low pressure and said, come sit, come play, come try on. And I think sometimes you need another excuse to get into a space to feel like you can try on versus just going into a retail establishment. You feel a little bit like, well, I have to buy. But we thought coffee would be an easy way to say, no, just drink a cup of coffee with us and put something fun on your body.
How do you two (Mandi and Ali) know each other?
Ali: We actually met at our last job. Mandi walked in and was working at the store and I was like this girl is way too cool to work at this place and the rest is history.
We spent two and a half years working together. That kind of connected us and got our brains going and seeing how market trends changed in terms of literal vintage markets, not big scale markets and the rest is history from there.
Where we can find you?
Mandi: So we’re based at the heart of Pioneer Square. We’re right across from Cowgirls, so everyone seems to know where that is for some reason. We’re calling it the new vintage row, to be honest. We have Frida right down the street. We have Lemon Grove right down the street. Bon Voyage. Come down and get vintage. That’s what the area is now.
How did you get into vintage?
Mandi: When I applied for the job that I met Ali at, I was actually hoping to learn a little bit about vintage to open my own store. We got really into markets and we were loving that for a long time.
Ali: Mandi very clearly knew, and I kind of stumbled into it, I fell into vintage, I fell into this job and it sounded interesting to me and really learned vintage from other people, from market vendors that I looked up to. I started wearing vintage 70s suits as a power move because I was working with a lot of men and felt uncomfortable being called sweetheart. I was like, wait, a 70s silhouette fits great on my body!
Talk a little bit about what a first-time customer can expect when they come in.
Mandi: We’re eclectic, we’re all over the place. We have 12 different stylists and they all have their own niche. We have an amazing plus-size vendor called Heavy Duty. We have an artist that focuses mainly on silks. We have someone that does 60s, we have someone that’s 90s. Your style will be here. You’ll find your color booth and you’ll know where to go. We simplify it.
Ali: I think the price point too is really important. We get that comment a lot, even ringing things up at the register. The price point is, for vintage, incredibly attainable as far as vintage generally goes. You can get a couple of pieces and not feel like shopping vintage was a stretch.
Mandi: That’s by design, because we want it to be intentional. We want you to want to buy vintage and it not to be scary.
Tell me a little bit more about your stylists. How does that work?
Ali: Honestly, in the beginning, we went with people that we knew. We had done markets for long enough that we went with people who just naturally kind of made sense. It was a really easy thing. We sat down, we were like, okay, we want to fit this niche, this niche, this niche, and this niche. And it was really easy to just call up our friends and be like, okay, are you ready? Like, it’s time. I think they were all kind of waiting. I had been in it for almost five years at that point, and everybody was kind of like, oh, these two are ready to do something. They’re going to shake vintage up. So we called up our friends, and it was pretty easy. At this point, as we’ve watched the neighborhood and the kind of people who come through, I always like to say that the great part about having so many different people in here is that there is a booth for every person, right? Like, you can walk in and you can see yourself. And that is a really cool thing.
As we look for more, it’s a pretty easy to notice different niches. For example, when we first opened, we had maybe three more masculine-leaning vendors. Mandi and I were talking about it, and she said” She was like, “I think we really need a true vintage masculine vendor.” So we texted some of our friends who were in here, and sure enough, we got one.
People always ask about the name, it is about showing people off. It was meeting cool people at markets and being like, “hey, have you met this person?” No, I haven’t. Let’s link them. And it feels like such a natural – every person is an exhibit in their own way, right? And so Friend Museum was born because we literally naturally saw, we could text friends and be like, do you know this person? Oh, I know this person. Charlie’s great. And Charlie is secondhand Seattle, and he does a lot of our true, more masculine-leaning vintage, and slid right into what we saw was a gap in our space.
Mandi: And to be fair, that everyone that we have has kind of, for lack of a better word, fallen into our lap, as well as coffee, as well as wine, as well as stylists, as well as artists.
It’s people kind of reaching out to the community, asking, do you have a place for this? And us being like, yes, we do. Yeah.
What’s been the reception in the neighborhood?
Mandi: It’s been good. I mean we definitely have the corporate side to it, right? We have Dell in the building, we have Lyft in the building, we have Nestle across the street. But I think we get a good amount of just the girlies, right?
Ali: Yeah. I think there was a reason that we chose Pioneer Square. It was kind of Pioneer Square or nowhere else for us and that is truly because this neighborhood is so special. It feels a little bit New York, a little bit Euro. You could easily close down all these streets and we could walk them and it would be an amazing neighborhood. It also feels possible, like there’s room and we have been in a lot of different neighborhoods.
Every time there’s a new vintage vendor, like Mandi said earlier, in this vintage row, we are so excited because it just means more community and everybody else reflects that in this neighborhood, in collaborating.
What makes this neighborhood so special is that you are truly working together in a way that I haven’t seen done in other neighborhoods as much. That reflects back on coffee. We have people from the coffee shops that are in the neighborhood come in and get coffee from us and we go elsewhere.
As for Pioneer Square, we recognize that it is still a building neighborhood and so everybody wins, right? We’re not fearful. We are working together knowing that this is a pretty cool neighborhood and it’s kind of like, hey, we know about this. You want to come play?
Tell us more about the space!
Ali: It was a gym and it was owned by a queer woman. And she had this for years and years and years and years. And she hadn’t been in here post close. And they closed in the pandemic. And she actually came this year to the first time and stepped in here because Alyssa Bola was like, I think I just want you to try. You don’t have to. She lives in the neighborhood. She passed by it all the time. She said, you don’t have to, but I think you should try. And she came in and Alyssa brought her down and introduced her to me. And I told her our story and she took a deep breath and she said, OK, like this is OK and started to cry. And I started to cry. And it was like one of those like it just this space was meant to be ours. And it was, for lack of a better term, blessed in a nonreligious way by Tia and Sandy. Like they really like came before us and these amazing queer women to come before us and do this and then be like, OK, it’s time to let go. Like it’s time for a new generation to take over.
I saw on the sign as I walked in, “try the O’Keeffe”. Tell us about some of the beverages that you can expect.
Ali: You want to tell about our grandma beverages each?
Mandi: Well, we got to start with the grandma beverages because there’s two named after our grandmas. There’s the Nancy, which is a…
Ali: Orange Blossom Mocha. It tastes like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange. Every year for Christmas, my grandma would give me a Terry’s Chocolate Orange in my stocking when I first tried it. Mandi, I watched her watch me make it and I thought she was fully judging me, which later she said I was. And then she tried it and she was like, that’s delicious. But my grandmother passed away unexpectedly last year. It was a huge matriarch in my life. And similarly, Mandi’s grandmother was. We have one named after her.
Mandi: But the Terry’s one is nostalgia in a cup. I had a sip and I was like, oh, I don’t think I had had one in 20 years. And I was like, that’s that’s that. And then the Koi is after my grandma Mimi, who used to always do cherry pies. Her favorite holiday was the 4th of July. Just honestly, so she can drink beer and have pie.
Ali: Smart woman. They were both very smart women.
Mandi: So we have a cherry latte named after her as well. Also great in a matcha. The Koi is fantastic in a matcha.
Ali: But the goal was when it was opened, was it was really important that it was a specialty cafe. We weren’t going to do everything. We were going to do a limited menu. And so we have oat milk and regular milk as our milk options. We keep it pretty simple. We don’t do nut products. And then to use not in-house syrups, but they are very small batch local syrups. So one, a lot of them come from Bend, Oregon. And we name them all after female artists, painters, poets. And most of our grandmothers were, in their own right, artists.
Intentionalist is all about spending like it matters and encouraging people to shop local over the larger big box online retailers. Could you talk a little bit about why it’s important that people shop intentionally, shop locally and spend like it matters?
Mandi: I mean with vintage especially, right, it is so important we don’t have any more new things in this world. There’s no more space, that I can promise you. If you’ve not visited a landfill, I put it on your list of things to do. There is no more, there is no more space. We are saving the world by shopping vintage. We can’t keep doing what we’re doing, we can’t keep living like we’re living. That’s my spiel.
Ali: A hundred percent, I mean I think landfill is stinky, put your mask on, but you should have to see it. And also if you’ve ever been to a thrift store, to compound upon that, you just go through and it’s Shein, Shein, Shein, Shein, Shein, Shein. But also in terms of just spending local in general, you can see people’s lives change. I have seen, I can remember the first market I ran post COVID. And I remember meeting vendors for the first time and them being so nervous. And me being like, I think it’s going to be okay. Or I remember my first markets and being like, you don’t know what you’re doing, do you? And I was like, no. And they just took me under their wing and they are one of my closest friends to this day. They have a shop up in West Seattle, Hoste. Lana’s our dear friend.
And so seeing these vendors like terrified on their first day and then seeing them now, what are we, 20, 25, five years later, they have brick and mortars themselves or they have a space in our space or another space. When you shop local, you are actually changing somebody’s life. You are allowing them to do something that they dreamed of. You can get as big or as small as you want on that.
I’ve been thinking a lot, and this is maybe a tangent that you’ll need to edit out, but I’ve been thinking a lot about art and artists. And I don’t care the skill level an artist is born with. At some point, every artist wants to give up. It doesn’t matter if you’re good at drawing or if you’re bad at drawing. And what separates one artist from another artist is maybe a group of people saying, you’re good at that. You should do that. You should keep going, even if they’re not like naturally super talented. And what shopping local and supporting local artists and makers is doing is saying you can do that. And so maybe you’re encouraging somebody to keep going. And that is building something that is so powerful and such a rebellion in this world.
Mandi: I was going to say the same thing. Supporting your community is an act of resistance.
Ali: Absolutely. That’s all you can do right now.
Anything you’d like to add? What else would you like people to know?
Mandi: We’re open seven days a week, nine to five. So come anytime. Bring friends. Sit in community. You don’t have to buy anything. Come hang out. Just be in the space with us.
Ali: Just be with us. It’s so counterintuitive to retail, but I didn’t want a store. I wanted a community. Billie is on this couch, you know, half of the time. She is probably the epitome of how we feel about this space. She will greet you with a wagging tail. She wants you to come sit with her and hang out with her. Bring your art projects. Bring whatever you’re working on. Let’s talk about how we can care for each other in this moment. The doors are open.
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