I talk a lot about finding the stories that define you as a specialty coffee business. And I talk about using those stories to differentiate your business from competing brands. When I talk about stories, people often assume I mean origin stories, founder stories, employee stories, or stories around consequential events in the growth of … Read more
There’s a roaster I follow on Substack. Every post does the same three things. He writes about the origins of the coffees he’s roasting. He writes about his roasting process. And then he writes, at length, about the taste profile of each one. There is nothing remarkable about that. It’s what every roaster does. Origins, … Read more
Imagine a visitor arriving at your home page and seeing your brand for the very first time. Better still, check your analytics and see how first-time visitors behave after viewing your home page. How long do they stay there? How many click through to other pages? How many leave after just a few seconds? One … Read more
Coffee is a commodity. A coffee bean is a coffee bean and, by and large, all coffee beans look the same. The journey coffee beans take from the tree through processing, distribution, roasting, and delivery to your doorstep… is also the same. This presents coffee roasters and stores with a problem. How can they differentiate … Read more
If you heard on the news that heavy flooding had caused five deaths in Shimen County, Hunan Province, in central China, you probably wouldn’t feel much. Sure, it’s sad. But it probably wouldn’t make you feel sad. And if I asked you about the flooding story later the same day, you probably wouldn’t remember any … Read more
In my last post, I wrote about how the secret to differentiating your business from the competition is to tell your unique story. Every business has its own founder story, origin story, employee and customer stories, and more. In this post, I want to show you what I mean. For the purposes of this demonstration, … Read more
One of the challenges you face when selling specialty coffee is that your coffee beans look the same as everyone else’s. They’re coffee beans. This means you don’t have the advantage of being able to design your product so it stands out from the crowd, in the same way Porsche might design a car to … Read more