Capella James

Capella James serves as Director of Marketing for WM Restaurants, leading brand strategy and creative direction for both Allora and Aiona. Largely self-taught, her path into marketing grew organically from a lifelong connection to restaurants, storytelling, and design.

Raised in a culinary family, with a chef brother and pastry chef mother, Capella spent much of her twenties working in hospitality, from cocktail waitress and hostess to server and bartender in high-end dining rooms. Those early years shaped her understanding of what guests truly feel and remember. Later, after time spent as a decorative painter and then at home with her young children, she re-entered the professional world through entrepreneurship, helping build and brand products for her husband’s company. During that time, she collaborated with national packaging and marketing teams and contributed to projects connected to larger media platforms, expanding her perspective on how brands are built, expressed, and experienced at scale.

That work, combined with her role as an ongoing creative and strategic sounding board for her husband’s ventures, deepened her instinct for translating vision into something tangible and cohesive. In 2017, she was drawn back into restaurants to help open Woodlake Tavern, Uptown Pizza Kitchen, The Atrium, and eventually Allora in 2018.

At Allora, Capella helped shape and grow the restaurant’s identity from its earliest days, guiding its voice, visual identity, digital strategy, and community relationships through seasons of expansion, challenge, and resilience. She has collaborated with national marketing firms and outside ventures, but her greatest strength lies in translating an owner’s vision into a brand that resonates deeply with the community. For her, marketing is not simply about driving traffic, but about expressing the heart, soul, and purpose of a team before a guest ever walks through the door.

With Aiona, Capella brings decades of shared experience and hard-won insight into a launch that feels both intentional and refined. Her goal is simple: that guests arrive with high expectations and leave feeling they experienced something even more meaningful than they imagined.

Originally from the Pacific Northwest’s San Juan Islands, Capella spent more than two decades in Southern California before relocating with her family to Austin, Texas in 2022. Outside of work, she finds grounding in time with her husband and two children, walks with her dogs, weekends on the lake, tending her ever-growing collection of houseplants, and cheering on her kids in the pursuits they love.