To set your brand apart, start with Story Discovery.
In the world of specialty coffee, only stories can separate your business from all your competitors.
There are two types of stories we need to understand.
The first type of story is all about you and your business. These are the stories you see on almost every specialty coffee site, with an emphasis on origin and founder stories. These stories can helpful, but if they sound too generic, they can become another way to fall into the sameness trap.
The second type of story is rooted in your customers. In these stories it is your customers who are the heroes.
This second type of story taps into the power of social identity. It’s where people hold up a product and say, “This brand means something to me. I belong here, along with all the other people who love this brand.”
Think Apple, Nike, Dove and other brands that share stories to build powerful loyalty among their customers.
This is the kind of story you need for your business.
Ready to jump in right away?
If I had you at “story” and you’d rather skip any more reading and jump right in, let’s set up a time for a phone call.
But if you want more detail first…
Step One: Story Discovery
A focused engagement to uncover, shape, and articulate the core stories of your brand.
Every coffee business has more good stories than it realizes. The problem is rarely a shortage of material. It’s knowing where to look, how to recognize a story worth telling, and how to shape it into something that resonates with the people you’re trying to reach.
Our Story Discovery engagement solves that problem systematically.
How it works
Phase 1 — Research
We begin with an immersive research process designed to surface customer-focused stories that are unique to your business. Once we’re ready to get started, I’ll send you the link to an online questionnaire. It comprises 6 sections, designed to surface your customer stories. It also digs deep into your beliefs as a company.
Phase 2 — Story Curation
From the research phase, we identify all viable story candidates, and then evaluated them using the SPICE Rubric™.
The SPICE Rubric™ is a proprietary framework developed for Bean & Brand to assess the quality and usefulness of brand stories across five dimensions:
S — Significance + P — Protagonist + I — Insight + C — Conflict + E — Emotion
Stories that score well across all five dimensions of the SPICE Rubric™ are organized by category and synthesized into a clean, readable Story Curation Document, which is returned to you for review and confirmation.
Phase 3 — Messaging Framework
With your core stories identified and validated, we build the messaging framework that ties everything together. This framework shows you how to use your most compelling stories to frame what you say, and how you say it. Think of it as a story-powered brand voice guide. This becomes the foundation that all subsequent content work is built upon.
What you receive
By the end of Story Discovery, you’ll have two things that most coffee businesses never develop properly.
First, a Story Curation Document — a carefully researched and rigorously evaluated collection of your brand’s most powerful stories, ready to put to work across your marketing.
Second, a Messaging Framework — your core brand narrative, and clear guidance on how to express your story consistently across web, email, and social.
This framework helps determine how you speak about your company, how you communicate your values, and how you talk about important issues like sustainability
Together these give you something more valuable than any individual piece of content: a story foundation that everything else can be built on.
Investment
$2,100 – including a follow-phone call.
Step Two: Story-Driven Website Rewrite
With Story Discovery completed, we know exactly what your brand stands for and how express it through story. The most important thing to do with that knowledge is also the most urgent. We need to revise at least some of the core messaging on your website.
Your homepage, your About page, your product pages — these are where the sameness problem lives. They’re the pages a potential customer reads before deciding whether to buy, subscribe, or reach out. Right now, there’s a good chance they sound like the same pages on your competitors’ sites.
Step Two fixes that directly, using the stories and messaging framework we built in Step One. Every page we rewrite is grounded in what makes your business genuinely unlike any other — your specific history, your sourcing relationships, your founder’s voice, your values as they actually exist rather than as a generic claim.
What’s included
We begin with the pages that matter most and work outward from there:
Homepage — The first and most important page; rewritten to lead with your story, not the industry’s shared vocabulary
About page — Deepens that story with the specific history, people, and values that make your brand unlike any other
Product and collection pages — Copy that goes beyond flavour notes and freshness claims to the stories behind the coffee
Additional pages — Contact, subscription landing pages, and others as needed
How it works
We begin with the highest-priority pages and work through them in an agreed sequence. Each page is drafted, shared for your feedback, and refined until it’s right.
How much of a website rewrite is involved? That’s up to you. You might ask me just to make some high-level messaging suggestions, and leave the details and execution to your team. Or you might ask me to do a more substantial rewrite of the the site.
Once the core website reflects who you actually are, we can extend that voice into ongoing content — emails, newsletters, blog posts — through a monthly retainer. But the website comes first, because everything else you publish points back to it.
Investment
Website rewrite projects are scoped and priced based on the number of pages involved, and the depth of my involvement requested. Pricing is discussed and agreed before any work begins, with no hidden costs. Monthly retainer pricing for ongoing content is available to clients who complete the website rewrite first.
Ready to take Step One?
Story Discovery is where every Bean & Brand engagement begins. It’s focused, it’s affordable, and it will change the way you think about your marketing.
Reach out to me through the Contact page and we’ll set up a time to talk.