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Hamzah Nasser was not the school type. While his friends were having fun in libraries, on top of books, he found himself restless, unable to enjoy the structured world of academia.
After a single semester of college, he was done.
He took a job as a clerk at a gas station, a humble start that seemed a world away from the ambitious, multi-million dollar deals he would one day orchestrate.
But even then, a certain instinct was at work.
“Everywhere I worked, I had good ethics,” he says. “I naturally would fall into a position of being in charge.”
He wasn’t asking for it; people just relied on him.
He was driven by a clear, unshakeable belief: he didn't want to work for anyone else.
He saw his friends climbing the corporate ladder, only to hit a glass ceiling.
“For me, it was just like, I want my ladder to be unlimited,” he says. “I just want to keep climbing it until I see where it’s going to lead.”
Three years after starting as a clerk, he bought the gas station.
He was young, the economy was in a recession, and it was a risky move. But it was the first rung on his own ladder.
He had no idea that ladder would eventually be built on coffee beans.
* * *
After a year and a half, the danger of running a gas station in a struggling Detroit wore on him.
He sold it and bought a fleet of trucks, joining the ranks of Somali and Yemeni entrepreneurs who had found a foothold in the logistics industry.
For six years, he drove across all 48 states, the long, lonely hours on the road giving him time to think.
He found himself spending more and more of his off-time in coffee shops, observing how they brought people together.
“It’s something that builds a community,” he realized. “And I really want to do something of my own.”
He leased a location in his hometown of Dearborn, Michigan.
The idea was simple: create a clean, welcoming space where people could gather, a “halal bar” that was a stark alternative to the city’s ubiquitous hookah lounges.
He wanted to build a place for the Muslim woman who had nowhere to go between school and home, for the young couple on a date, for the student and the business professional.
He began construction, pouring his savings into the project.
Then, the world shut down.
The COVID-19 pandemic hit, and a state-mandated construction halt brought his dream to a dead stop.
“I was like, ‘Oh, man, I just spent all this money,’” he recalls. “‘What the heck am I doing?’”
He had spent over a hundred thousand dollars, and now, for eight excruciating months, the site sat silent.
His ladder was hanging in mid-air.
* * *
“You just have to go with it,” Hamzah says, reflecting on that period of uncertainty. “I need to just keep going with what I already started. And whatever the results are, they are.”
He kept going.
When Haraz Coffee House finally opened in April 2021, the city was just emerging from lockdown.
Restaurants were capped at 10% occupancy. But the community, starved for connection, flooded in.
“We were probably 200% occupied,” he says with a laugh. “We couldn't stop people from coming in.”
The response was immediate and overwhelming.
He saw Yemenis, Lebanese, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, and Sudanese all sitting together, laughing and enjoying their time.
He even saw curious non-Muslims, initially skeptical, walk in and have their mindsets changed.
“If we didn't have that,” he says, “I don't think there's any other thing that could bring that many different demographic backgrounds together.”
He quickly realized his vision was much bigger than a single location.
The requests for new shops poured in from across the country. He opened a second and then a third location in metro Detroit.
But he knew that to protect the soul of Haraz, to ensure its consistency and authenticity, he had to make a critical decision.
Licensing the name wasn't enough. He had to build a franchise.
* * *
The move to franchising was a massive undertaking. To sustain the explosive growth, he needed infrastructure.
He leased, and then purchased, a 70,000-square-foot building in Dearborn, a former Ford Motor Company prototype center.
It was a place where his grandfather, who had worked on the F-150 assembly line for 34 years, had once seen his own bosses work.
“When he comes and sees we're sitting in his boss's seats, that's good,” Hamzah says with pride. “And we own the building.”
From this new headquarters, he built out the teams—real estate, project management, operations, marketing—to manage the expansion.
Today, Haraz Coffee House has 31 locations, with over 200 more in development across North America, the Gulf states, and North Africa.
The secret to this growth, he believes, is staying true to the original mission: sharing the heritage of Yemeni coffee.
He speaks of the port of Mocha, the economic backbone of an ancient Yemen, and the devastating impact of the qat trade.
He sees his work as a way to help restore that legacy, creating jobs both in Yemen and in every community a Haraz shop opens.
He is now known as “The Face of Coffee,” a title that carries a heavy responsibility.
His business is seen not just as a Yemeni coffee shop, but as a Muslim coffee shop, a space that must welcome everyone while staying true to its principles.
* * *
From the rooms where Ford executives once designed cars, Hamzah Nasser is now designing an empire.
His five-year plan is to take Haraz Coffee House public on the stock market by 2030, aiming to become a multi-billion-dollar company.
The vision extends far beyond coffee, into clothing, real estate, and nonprofit organizations to give back to communities in the U.S. and in Yemen.
This grand ambition is the next stage of the unlimited ladder he spoke of building all those years ago, a ladder with no glass ceiling.
It’s driven by the same principle that has guided him from the start.
“You have to aim for something that big in order to achieve as much as possible,” he says.
The man who started on the bottom rung is still climbing, and he’s inviting an entire community to climb with him.
Readers like you keep The Muslim Brief alive. Without your support, these inspiring Muslim stories will disappear.
Join other readers who have already stepped up as monthly contributors. Your support makes it possible to keep telling the inspiring stories our community deserves. If we don’t fund them ourselves, no one else will.