(Image source: Blue Bottle Coffee)
Author | Michelco
Producer | Wu Shuyi
If you were given a chance to choose, would you be a struggling clarinetist or the founder of a coffee brand?
James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee chose the latter.
On February 25, 2022, Chinese mainland's first blue bottle coffee arrived in Shanghai as scheduled. This specialty coffee, which stood out in the third wave of coffee, took the lead.
Regarding the blue bottle of coffee, james Freeman, the founder of the music background, is romantic and artistic in the location and store design, and prudent and rigorous in the commercial pace, but all this is cleverly compensated by Bryan Meehan, the CEO with commercial operations and brand operations.
This makes the blue bottle coffee not only full of Freeman's strong mannerism, but also has the commercial value of boutique chains. You'll see that the almost demanding standardization and perfectionism of high-end retail, as well as the vibrant community and interactivity of individual brands, are cleverly compatible in the growth of a brand.
This may have unique case study implications for coffee brands that developed in China during the same period. Different from Starbucks and Luckin's thousand-store model, and different from Manner's concentrated regional expansion, Blue Bottle Coffee will not provoke a battle of speed and scale in the short term.
For specialty coffee chains such as M Stand and Seesaw, blue bottle coffee may inspire a deeper brand culture update in terms of service, product and innovation, and a brand that is closely linked to the surrounding area of the community and continues to develop in environmental protection and sustainability may evolve into in the future.
01
Swipe your credit card to start a business and open a Peugeot 505 delivery
One day in January 2004, San Francisco was still shining brightly. The dining car with blue bottle coffee was lined up with a line of 30-40 people. Freeman suddenly realized that some highlight moment might be coming, "maybe it's done." A year later, he opened his first store for blue-bottled coffee in a garage a few blocks from Twitter's headquarters.
Silicon Valley Tech circles have a penchant for Blue Bottle Coffee as much as they appreciate salad bar, and former Twitter President Evan William is a big fan of Blue Bottle Coffee, who also invested in the company in 2014. Not to be outdone, co-founder Jack Dorsey went on to start Square, a giant in the U.S. mobile payments world who built payment and CRM systems for BluePool Coffee.
In 2017, Swiss food giant Nestlé bought a 68 percent stake in the company for about $425 million, and the valuation of Blue Bottle Coffee rose all the way to $700 million. Prior to that, he was a struggling clarinet player.
Freeman has long been obsessed with fresh coffee. Around 2002, barely a single coffee shop in San Francisco sold bagged coffee with a roast date printed on it, which made Freeman, obsessed with fresh coffee, decide to do it himself.
Near his apartment in Oakland's Templecal neighborhood, he rented a 186-square-foot potted shed for $600 a month and drove to Dierich, an Iowa-based bean dryer maker, to shop for an old-fashioned machine. As a result, the amount of beans baked in a single trip increased to 7 pounds, and Freeman drove his Peugeot 505 through the blocks to deliver.
If he hadn't had the courage to owe a $15,000 credit card debt, Freeman might not have made a blue bottle of coffee. Playing clarinets in local orchestras does not make money, the income is only enough to support the family, renting greenhouses and dryers for money, delivery for oil, and paying a local graphic designer "logo design fee", these are all costs.
Freeman, who bet on all his worth, can only rely on two credit cards to continue his dream after using up his savings.
In 2008, after receiving a multimillion-dollar financing from Kohlber Ventures, Blue Bottle entered New York in 2010.
In 2012, a key figure in the history of Blue Bottle Coffee emerged, he is the current CEO of the brand, Bryan Meehan, who is also an early investor in the brand, and a powerful promoter of the brand's multiple rounds of financing and expansion as soon as possible.
This year, he hooked up friends and, along with Ture Ventures and Index Ventures, completed Blue Bottle's Series A funding round for $20 million.
Bryan Meehan founded Fresh & Wild, a high-volume retailer selling organic food in the UK, and in 2004 successfully sold it to the famous high-end fresh retail Whole Foods Market (now part of Amazon) in the United States. In 2007, Bryan Meehan founded a cosmetics company called Nude Skincare, which focuses on natural ingredients and environmental protection.
In an interview with U.S. media, Freeman claimed to lack business acumen but was deeply involved in products. He can remember the origin and name of the farmer of each coffee, and can taste the taste of various coffees, which is a natural match for Bryan Meehan, who is good at business operations and financing investments.
After Morgan Stanley and Google Ventures began to intervene in 2014, Blue Bottle Coffee entered Los Angeles, another important position in California, and in 2015, they completed a Series C financing amount of $75 million, and opened the Japanese market in the same year, which was the first overseas store of Blue Bottle Coffee.
Since then, the process of internationalization has been accelerated, and it has also been accompanied by the rapid sweep of the third coffee wave in the world, with the brand entering South Korea in 2019 and coming to Shanghai in 2022. According to the official website data and public information, the current distribution of 102 stores around the world is as follows:
(Wu Yiyi studio drawing, there are currently 2 stores in Beijia temporarily closed)
Although Blue Bottle Coffee rarely discloses revenue data, profitability has become almost an instinct. People who have carried card debt are more aware of the hardships of making money, which gives Freenman a natural restraint and prudence in brand expansion. "Every month I make sure I have money left in my company's bank account."
Therefore, there has never been a loss since the launch of the offline store. Bryan Meehan's addition in 2012 brought this commercialization capability to a climax, and with the expansion of scale, freenman's early accumulation of brand culture influenced it.
This influence has a very subtle landing point. In the early stages of selling, they used the most clumsy telephone method to communicate with customers, always asking the question "Please ask which coffee you like, please ask how much coffee you prefer to drink".
If the conversation is pleasant enough, the credit card number will be reported on the other end of the phone, and then the blue bottle will deliver coffee to the door once a week.
02
Chaining, training and standardization
The Blue Bottle still retains the tradition of phone ordering today, which is more of a tribute to the early entrepreneurial road. The company believes that in addition to good products, the customer experience is also crucial.
According to the FBI's Food & Beverage Innovations, "At present, the first store of the Blue Bottle Coffee Chinese mainland has about 50 employees, including about 40 baristas. The pre-training of baristas is more than two months, and trainers from blue bottles from the United States, Japan and Hong Kong, China are trained in Shanghai."
Compared with domestic coffee chains that like to poach people from Starbucks and Peets, Blue Bottle Coffee is more inclined to look for the right person rather than someone with "industry experience". CEO Bryan Meehan mentioned that the first question in the interview when hiring employees is "do you drink coffee?", and it is difficult for a person who is not interested in coffee to appreciate the craftsmanship of making coffee.
Bryan Meehan, who is good at commercial operations and management, has the advantages at this time, even if it is artisanal coffee that emphasizes ingenuity, standardization must not be lacking if it is to make a successful chain.
As a result, a highly mature and rigorous training system was established, allowing employees to recognize the brand core and corporate culture of Blue Bottle Coffee at the beginning of their employment. In particular, everyone in the company, regardless of their position, must learn to turn the blue bottle upside down perfectly, which is a key part of the production process.
In addition, non-store employees (such as administrative management posts, etc.) work shifts once every six months, and need to rotate in different positions behind the counter in the material preparation room or production room to ensure that employees understand the job responsibilities of each link. Matt Longwell, head of beverage and equipment management, admits that this does make people more aware of the significance of back-office work for customers and stores.
And from the moment you step into the store, the brand's carefully set up "interactive experience journey" begins for you.
The first link takes place at the entrance of the store. Can the door be opened with zero fingertip contact during the pandemic? Are customers satisfied with their health protection measures? Pet-friendly stores, do dog bowls filled with drinkable fresh water? These details must be checked for confirmation.
The second link. Is the store background music atmosphere and the barista communication atmosphere OK when customers queue up to place orders? According to the book Blue Bottle Story, baristas can change an album for guests who walk in, or choose the background music freely.
(Image source: Blue Bottle Story)
If you have already placed an order and encounter a long queue, the barista needs to know how to "explain the progress" with the customer, for example, there are several orders in front of you to make your coffee, which is accompanied by a smile and greeting when handing the coffee to the customer (the cup blue bottle logo should be facing outward), which is the third and fourth links.
The fifth step occurs when the drink delivery is completed, and whether the customer stays or leaves, it is necessary to keep the environment clean and the atmosphere good. These standardized links are designed in detail at each store, penetrating almost all the details of the barista's work.
Cary Cheng, the head of management involved in the design of these standardized links, believes that the so-called sales contact may occur at any moment after the customer enters the store, which is why from the moment the door is pushed in, the eye contact and friendly greeting between the barista and the customer should not stop, and all the standards must be uniformly met.
The more critical standard is in the production process and process, according to the introduction of the official WeChat account of Blue Bottle Coffee China, the roasting factory set up in Pengpu, Shanghai, can carry out a single small batch of about 35 kilograms of fresh roasting. Roasters manually calibrate the baking curve based on the condition of the green beans and the amount of baked portions to achieve global product flavor consistency.
03
Community, local and sustainable
Of course, if you come to the first store in Shanghai on the opening day of the Blue Bottle Coffee Chinese mainland, you may not experience this ultimate service, the queue is 100 meters away, the waiting time is more than 3 hours, and when you get the drink, the above flowers have dispersed.
But you can still feel a strong sense of "community interaction" in the overall environment and in selling products. For example, Shanghai Yutong store has launched a long-established dim sum cake dumpling from Shanghai, which is quite compatible with the taste of coffee; some cultural and creative weekly films cooperated with Shanghai local illustrator Peng Kai are also on sale.
(Image source: Blue Bottle Coffee, obtained from the FBIF)
Prior to the opening of the Kiyosumi Shirakawa store in Tokyo, Japan, the clerk will also distribute small gifts and door-to-door notifications in the nearby community to increase contact with customers. This time in Shanghai, they provided a hand-drawn map to show the historical and cultural landscape and fun places on the Suzhou River near the store, hoping to promote a new and larger area.
(Image from Blue Bottle Coffee, obtained from the FBIF)
Interactions with the community are sometimes unexpected, in California, blue bottle coffee uses about 1 ton of coffee grounds per week, and nearby farms are jam-producing, and blue bottles naturally provide them with coffee grounds as compost, which is good for the environment from a recycling point of view and better for the community from a commercial symbiosis point of view.
The significance of Bryan Meehan's story may explain the important corporate culture of Blue Bottle, "community", "locality" and "sustainability". They even swapped all plastic iced coffee cups for sugar cane cups to reduce the consumption of paper cups and thus reduce the impact on [climate change].
Since the news that the blue bottle is going to enter China, the media has focused a lot of attention on "site selection", away from shopping malls and transportation hubs, and the tendency to old factories, old warehouses and museums seems to have become their unique labels, but if you look closely, it may just be a historical habit.
For example, the selected Shanghai store is located on the banks of the Suzhou River, which follows the consistent "hydrophilicity" of the blue bottle. Because in the early days of the development of blue bottles, in order to expand the customer base, it was inevitable to migrate from Auckland, which was relatively backward in the economy, to San Francisco with higher consumption levels and population density.
Oakland and San Francisco face each other across the water, and drive along Route 80 across the New Bay Bridge to reach the Fisherman's Wharf-side blue-bottle coffee meeting point. Every three to four blocks, a Blue Bottle Coffee lands.
(Image source: Screenshot of Google Maps)
And if you look closely at the map, cross the bay's three roads, whether it's Route 92 or Route 84, and follow them to the dock harbor, you'll be right away at the coffee shop.
Brandon L., a long-time los Angeles-based consumer analyst, believes that Freeman's personal style orientation should be fully taken into account in the development of blue bottle coffee.
First, the founder himself loves music and other art-related fields, and it is not unusual to choose a location close to opera houses and museums; secondly, the public transportation system in the United States is not developed, and the stores that choose to be at the transportation hub like China do not have much diversion value and do not have much reference significance, in addition, overseas stores obviously have a tendency to enter high-end shopping malls, and there is no deliberate avoidance.
But what is certain is that "relatively alienated from the most lively city center", "water adjacent to water" and "being able to lean back on the bakery" are the more prominent considerations in the selection of the site. This is the cultural heritage left by many early-stage consumer retail companies in the United States that relied on the community to survive in the early stage.
And even after the blue bottle of coffee rose to fame, in many public statements, Freeman still repeatedly mentioned the impact of Starbucks and Peets coffee on the overall industry and his personal impact.
For example, when he decided to roast beans in the narrow closet of his apartment in Oakland, it was because in 1966, Alfred Peet, the founder of Peets Coffee, managed to bake a single batch of 5 pounds of coffee beans in the first store, Mother Church.
It gave him a little confidence. This young man who loves to play clarinets, loves to bake beans, and loves coffee finally does not have to complain in the San Francisco Chronicle, and some coffee tastes like "the tire smell of a trolley".
Thanks to Cathie Ericson, Kaitlin Keefer and Square for their in-depth interviews and video materials on Blue Bottle Coffee.
Resources:
1.Tom Huddleston Jr.(2019.07.12). Blue Bottle Coffee: How a struggling clarinet player used $15,000 in credit card debt to launch a $700 million brand. CNBC Make it. Retrieved 2022.02.25.
2.Rona Marech. (2003.04.11). This-Oakland-man-is-serious-about-serious-coffee.San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2022.02.25.
3. Blue Bottle Coffee official website and China official website WeChat ID.
4. CbN Weekly "Blue Bottle Story", Oriental Publishing House, 2018.02.