How Super Coffee’s Jimmy DeCicco Built a Coffee Empire Backed by A-Rod
Join Jess Cervellon and Jimmy DeCicco, Chief Brand Officer of Super Coffee, as they explore the intricacies of brand management and marketing in the competitive field of consumer-packaged goods (CPG).
(upbeat music)
My name is Jess Servion,
and I'm super excited to bring you my new podcast,
The Juice With Jess.
This podcast is gonna be about everything
in your customer's journey.
We're talking acquisition, awareness,
making that purchase, retaining that customer,
bringing them back around, and everything in between.
This is gonna be all about delivering dope brand experiences
and talking to some really amazing people
who are in the customer experience space,
marketing space, and everything in between.
(upbeat music)
Welcome back to another episode of The Juice With Me, Jess.
This week, I'm super stoked because I have a buddy here
named Jimmy DeSico.
He is the chief brand officer of Super Coffee,
and Super Coffee was founded in 2015.
But the reason I said it funny,
a buddy is because Jimmy and I have been sitting here
realizing we're super connected
with so many other people in the e-commerce space,
and I think that's really tight.
So Jimmy, tell all the audience all about Super Coffee.
- What up, Jess?
This is awesome.
I'm excited to be here, leaving Chit Chat
and catching up, and I'm excited for this combo.
So yeah, I started Super Coffee in 2015
with my two younger brothers.
We were right out of school, my two brothers were in school.
I had just graduated.
And we didn't want to drink a Starbucks frappuccino
that had 45 grams of sugar and 300 calories.
And that was the only thing that was available.
So we started brewing coffee on our dorm room,
and we put protein in it, we put healthy fats,
MCT oil in it, we put a little extra caffeine in there.
And it worked, it tasted good, it was good for us.
It had functional ingredients,
and we started selling it to our teammates
and our classmates and our coaches.
And we walked into Whole Foods one day,
and in 2015, this was before Amazon was involved.
And we basically said, hey, we're super coffee,
and you don't carry anything like this.
And they were like, sure, we'll give you guys a shot.
So we got into one Whole Foods,
and we didn't know anything about this industry.
We didn't know what it took, we didn't know co-packing,
DSD, none of that.
- None of it.
- And all we knew is we needed to sell a lot of coffee.
So this one store manager did not know what he did
by saying we could sell at his store,
because he was like, sure,
you have two facings here in my produce section,
and we showed up every day.
We demoed every day.
Those two facings became 200 facings.
We took over the whole cooler, and before long,
I mean, we were the best selling bottle coffee
in that store, and we took those sales
to the store down the street,
and the next store, and the next store,
and that's how we built for the first couple of years.
- Man, that's so sick.
I think bootstrapped startups are just,
well, one, I'm a startup junkie.
- Yeah.
- So I love a moment of like,
you just gotta go figure it the fuck out, you know?
But I think that story is really inspiring.
And I also think what's really interesting too
is that now, so this was 2015,
we're talking nine years later, right?
There's so many like different functional coffees
and mushrooms and this and that and the other thing.
And I think you guys were like on the preface of that, right?
Like there was nothing like that out there.
- Yeah, back then, like bulletproof coffee was a recipe.
You know, like the vlog, like Dave Asperid
had just come back from like Nepal or something,
and he was putting yak butter in his coffee,
and like that was kind of far out.
But we were really the first to bottle this sort of
sugar-free frappuccino, if you will.
You know, like we want to taste like a Starbucks frappuccino
with the third of the calories, none of the sugar.
And there's this like weird spectrum,
or it's not weird, but the spectrum in beverage
where you have something that's familiar,
like a Starbucks frappuccino on one end.
And if you're too familiar,
like if we were just another coffee with milk and sugar,
people wouldn't adopt us.
They would have no reason to leave Starbucks for us.
And then on the other end, you have novel
and like biohacking, adaptogenic,
like, and if you're too novel and too scientific,
I don't think the mainstream will adopt you either.
So you got to play somewhere in the middle
where you kind of taste like Starbucks,
but you offer the benefits of the functional stuff
without hitting people over the head with the science.
- Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I think that's like, that's really interesting,
'cause I mean, like the whole purpose of this podcast
is honestly talking about like customer centricity
and like understanding that acquisition retention,
but like that customer journey.
And I think for you being a brand officer,
like I wanna get back to the journey of your customer,
but I actually wanna start here.
Can you tell the audience and the people listening in
or viewing what does a chief brand officer do?
- It's a good one.
You'll probably get a different answer from everybody,
but-- - I know.
- So I was the CEO for seven years.
We brought in a CEO end of 2022, which was great.
And I transitioned to chief brand officer.
And anybody you talk to starts a company says like,
the founders are the brand,
the founders are very passionate about the brand
and all of that.
And that was true to an extent,
but like I've defined chief brand officer
as chief business officer, right?
And what a lot of people don't realize,
or what I certainly didn't realize is that
marketing drives the P&L.
You know, we're not just coming up with creative ideas.
We're not just coming up with fancy decks
and target personas and all this stuff.
It's like, where are we spending money?
What is the return on that money?
Does the P&L work?
You know, how are we measuring success on this spend?
Who are we targeting?
Who are our loyalists?
And having built this thing from the ground up
with my brothers for seven years,
I felt very passionate about getting into
that chief brand officer role.
- Yeah.
- And partner, our new CEO, Tyler Ricks,
is a fantastic partner.
He was classically trained in brand management at Pepsi.
So he's come in and taught me so much
about how to manage the P&L
and how to measure traditional category management,
brand management stuff.
But for me, I touch every lever of business
from positioning statement and actual branding
on the bottle and website to where are we spending our money?
How are we measuring that money?
Where should we stop spending money?
And I think from 2021, compared to 2024,
it's a totally different business.
- Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, your customer changes.
- Yeah.
- So it's like 99 different years, right?
Like every year that customer has to change.
I mean, it doesn't have to change,
but they do change like the economics change,
people's, you know, people move around,
they do, there's different trends,
there's different fads and everything.
And I think it's like really interesting.
I think the brand manager or branding,
like non-brand marketing,
but like the brand type of role is really interesting
because it actually varies company to company.
- Yeah.
- I've like, I've seen some brand managers
or like people just,
I don't want to say like managers specifically,
but people managing the brand, right?
- Right.
- Doing completely different things.
Like there's one company I can think of
that I like help out like consulting
and their brand managers are handling
like affiliate and influencer or SMS marketing.
But those don't actually play with the overall
of what a brand manager does, you know?
- Totally.
- Everybody has like a different perception of it.
- It's, I think from the startup world,
it's totally different, right?
- Yeah.
- What I come from brand is your positioning,
your colors on the packaging,
how do you stand out on a shelf?
Like if your brand was a celebrity,
who would it be like that type of stuff?
Like I actually think of the essence of the brand,
but traditional brand management from a CPG perspective
at Pepsi, Coke, Kellogg's is category management.
You know, it's looking at the data,
it's where are we going to spend shop or marketing dollars?
How are we telling a story that we're better
than our competitors, incremental to the category?
- Yeah.
- It's a skew level story too.
Like, hey, our vanilla performs better
than Starbucks's caramel, so you got us,
you're losing, the skew is not productive for you.
And to me, like that is like data math science.
That's not brand when I think of brand,
but that's how brand management is defined.
- Totally, so you actually hit a really good point too,
even at Feastables, brand manager role
is actually like brand new there.
Shout out to my girl Laura.
I'm looking straight at the camera when I say this,
but so the person that's in this role at Feastables, right?
Super, super, super heavy in data,
like really like came from the strategy team,
got a lot of consumer research,
and now she's like on the brand manager side
on the marketing piece of it.
But I think it's like really interesting,
like the data piece of that brand manager role,
even though it's like the Pepsi and the Coca-Cola's
that traditionally have that data heavy stuff,
I think it's like so interesting that Feastables
or even other startup brands,
like think about that brand manager role
and like being heavy in analytics is my point, right?
Like I think a lot of times we think just in marketing,
like, okay, it's the ones, the feels,
and like the emotionality of the product, right?
But you also still gotta do
that consumer research piece of it.
You still gotta like, how is that color hitting
on your chocolate bar?
You know? - Right.
- Like or the coffee or whatever it is.
And I think it's, I think that data piece is so important
and I like just in my opinion,
the one tactical advice that I can give
to like a startup just starting out
is like thinking about the brand man,
like a brand manager position or your branding,
not just from like a, I've built my package
and I have this, this bottle that looks a certain way,
like how is it actually hitting
and like put a little data behind it
because you're gonna go a little bit farther
than just off assumptions.
- Yeah, yeah.
That's, I think that's right on, right?
Like when, when we first got started,
I mean to me and I think to most marketers,
when they hear brand or branding
or even brand management, they think of like liquid death,
you know, storytelling, media, how do you cut through,
how do you be different, you know, how do you entertain?
But then the whole traditional CPG looks at it
like what's our data story?
You know, why are we different?
How are we incremental?
And I don't think those things are mutually exclusive, right?
Like the more effective you tell that story,
the more effective you are telling that story,
the better your data is.
And the more you can sort of glean insights from that data,
the better stories you can tell for the category managers.
'Cause it all comes down to like,
at first when you don't have data,
you have to rely on our brand, right?
Like we are different because nobody else
is doing zero sugar protein coffee,
whatever that story is, before we have proof points,
you know, you have to tell why we're different
and then it becomes, okay, we've been doing this
for a couple of years now.
Not only are we different, like we're expanding the category
because we bring in customers
who don't buy a Starbucks Frappuccino, you know?
So you figure out what is,
why is your brand valuable to that category manager?
At least from a retail perspective.
Yeah, I mean, well, this is,
we said this before we even started recording,
like we were gonna get into this,
but I think that that's like a really interesting thing,
is that retail and D2C are two different places, right?
Like I think they're both very important,
especially as you're growing a brand,
like a company, you should always have like a digital presence
because we're in a digitally native world, right?
But I think what's interesting is that you see
a lot of like CPG companies,
if these tools is one of them,
like super coffee is another one,
'cause I'm just using the same examples right now.
But I think what's really interesting is that
you can start in D2C completely.
I'm starting it, I'm slinging my CPG brand
or even apparel or whatever it is, right?
And then at some point, flipping into retail
might make more sense for your brand, right?
So I'm actually curious for super coffee,
before we started recording,
you were saying that like you're exclusively on Amazon now,
like tell me about how that happens,
like what did the company go through to go to decide,
like I wanna just be exclusively on Amazon and retailers?
- Yeah, yeah.
So 85% of our business still happens in stores,
50,000 stores across the country.
And in 2022, we were sold on our website,
drinksupercoffee.com as well as Amazon,
but D2C was super expensive for us
to get people to show up at our website.
We were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month
on Facebook ads just to get people to show up.
And in our category, ready to drink beverages,
we have to sell for $3 a bottle, $36 a case,
a case weighs 10 pounds to ship,
so the margins are very thin on e-commerce.
But you also need to be available to people who may discover
you in a bodega in New York City
and wanna go subscribe on Amazon.
So we made the pivot, we put all of our e-commerce business
into Amazon, it was less of a less friction
and getting people to show up at our website.
We do a lot of targeted ads, keyword search type stuff
on Amazon to kind of own this healthy protein coffee category
on Amazon, but it is still a smaller business.
It's not like we discontinued D2C
and captured all that on Amazon.
I was surprised to see that.
Like we discontinued it in 2022.
2023 was about half of 2022's revenue online.
Like we basically lost all of Shopify,
barely captured any of it on Amazon.
And now this year we're starting to rebuild slowly,
but the good news is it's a lot more profitable than it was.
- Yeah, yeah.
I think a few of the days,
like you gotta go for what's more profitable, right?
- And especially in today's world.
In 2021, it didn't seem like anybody cared.
They were like, pour more money,
here's money, we're gonna invest this money.
So you could spend it on ads and drive that top line.
- Yeah.
- And that's what we did and we were great at it.
Like we built a sick brand,
but there was that unit economics only worked
if these people who we converted were buying
four or five, six times and on average they weren't.
So we were losing money on the cost to acquire customers.
- Right, absolutely.
What is, so with this new model,
like what does retention look like for you?
Like how are you like,
and these additional channels that aren't D2C
where you own that customer, right?
Like Amazon or your retailers,
like how do you look at like,
getting information about that repeat purchaser,
retaining them, getting them to continue coming back?
'Cause this is something we battled with at Feastables,
but every other like brands that I consult with
that are more predominantly in retail,
like they usually come to me,
just to understand the retention.
And I'm like, okay, well, we gotta go buy that data,
my friends.
- Totally.
- Yeah, so data super expensive.
Last year we had a spins account,
which is just NeelScenticated data.
This year we're on IRI,
they rebranded to like, Srikana or something.
And this is basically, it shows you the entire category.
So for us, ready to drink coffee by store, by channel.
So like, we could see Walmart and we could see the mass channel.
We could see Kroger and we could see the grocery channel.
We could see Wawa and we could see the convenience channel.
And every brand.
So you see where Starbucks is,
how they're performing, what their trend is,
over 52 weeks, 26 weeks, 13 weeks.
And that's kind of like the detailed analytics of it.
But then they have panel data too,
which shows how many heavy users are buying super coffee,
how many medium users are buying super coffee,
how many light.
And then there's different ways to target them.
So one thing we've been doing,
we partnered with this company called Catalina.
And we can see, they have credit card data.
So we can see that you bought a Starbucks Frappuccino.
And next time you're at the grocery store,
you're gonna get a little coupon that says 75 cents off
the first bottle of super coffee you try.
And then you buy super coffee with that coupon.
So now you're a super coffee customer and you're a light buyer.
We wanna convert you to a medium buyer.
So the next time you're at that grocery store,
you get a coupon that says save $2 off
of every four super coffees you buy.
So we went from 75 cents off of one bottle,
to now trying to take more money off of more bottles
and incentivizing you to become that loyalist.
It's not a perfect science.
- Yeah, but I think loyalty and rewards
is like the only real way you can like get them to come back
'cause you can't control that customer.
- Yeah, it's so hard to have loyalty today, it feels like.
- Dude. - Yeah.
And people, especially in retail,
people just buy what's available.
And if your product is out of stock
or if you're not on the shelf
or if there's a massive Starbucks display on the floor,
that's what people are gonna buy.
That's the sort of law of the category leader.
I think any category where there's a leader,
in coffee, it's Starbucks and sports drinks,
it's Gatorade and those people shift
from Starbucks to super coffee,
but then they always go back to Starbucks.
Now there's not really loyalty.
- Yeah, I think it's like, it's so in this category
and I think several categories in like CPG in general,
like it is really hard to like build the loyalty,
but I think it's really hard to break
the consumer behavior.
'Cause like when you mention the Gatorade thing, right?
Like if I'm sick, if I'm sick,
I'm not gonna go and try to go and figure out
like a new electric light drink, right?
Like I'm gonna go to the shelf, 7-Eleven, Walmart,
wherever it is and just grab the tried and true,
even if it's not the best for me
because like I don't feel well at that time.
You know, that's when I like drink Gatorade, right?
- Yeah. - It's, but when it's like
sports or athlete or any of those things,
like and I'm like got the time to think about it,
I'm gonna go research the better electrolyte companies.
You know? - Totally.
- But my point is it just to drive it home
about what you were saying about the behaviors
that like it is really hard to get like loyalty because,
and like you be that Starbucks, you be that Gatorade, right?
- Right. - It's like,
it's constant fucking science.
- Yeah, and it's a chicken or the egg, right?
'Cause like retailers won't take you unless you have data.
It's like space to sales ratio, you know?
You only get as much space as your sales deserve,
but if they're, if you're not in the stores,
if you're a new brand and you haven't got into 7-Eleven yet,
they're gonna look at rest-of-market performance and be like,
"Guys, you're not selling anywhere.
"Like we need to give this entire shelf to Starbucks."
And then once they give you that shot,
it might be two facings in the bottom shelf,
and they're like, "Hey, you're not performing
"as well as Starbucks."
No shit, we're buried on the bottom shelf.
So it's really hard for young brands to cut through
without spending a lot of money to get the right shelf space
to drive the proper awareness.
- Right. - You know?
And it's just a constant battle.
It's why your consumer is so expensive to get started.
- I know, for sure.
It is a constant battle, and I think we're probably not
giving the most tactical advice right now.
- No, yeah, we're just venting.
- It is a battle.
But I think, I mean, there's definitely tactics.
It's like going back to like being,
like just being in a digitally native world, right?
Like being really fun and innovative
when it comes to like spectacle marketing
or even like sampling.
Like these are all ways you can kind of intercept
on the, a little, I mean, this is field marketing,
but like on the ground and get in front of that customer.
Like liquid death, like liquid death,
going back to that example,
yes, is very much branding, right?
But like they became such a badass company
because they were going out there on the streets
and like, and really putting it in front of people, right?
- Totally. - And so, so now,
you know, years later, I'm actually a liquid death fan.
Like I'm gonna go to 7-Eleven
and go pick up the liquid death water before smart water.
- Right. - You know?
- Yeah. - But it's because
that field marketing pieces for them is very important.
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- I'm curious actually, now I'm in a whole
of field marketing.
- Yeah.
- But I'm curious, tell me about super coffee.
I know you briefly talked about it in the beginning
like you were going out there and you were sampling
on the stores, but what does that look like today?
Are you still doing sampling?
Are you still doing, being in the streets
and being like, try my coffee.
- Yeah, yeah, no, it's so definitely, right?
I was just in Columbus this weekend.
Columbus, Ohio for the Arnold Classic.
Big fitness expo, 100,000 people there into fitness
looking for a competitive advantage.
So protein coffee was like a great thing to have there.
We've been there for four or five years now.
So yeah, field marketing is a part of it.
I think one comment, I'll answer the super coffee story
in a second, but like, I heard this analogy the other day
that a brand manager, or whoever's responsible
for brand at a company is kind of like a disc jockey
who's got all these dials and knobs in front of you, right?
And it's not just field marketing, 100%, right?
It's dialing up field marketing a little bit
while you have a Facebook campaign going on,
while you're on sale at Whole Foods,
while you're running coupons at Catalina,
it is this constant 360 integrated marketing mix
that you have to pull all these levers at once.
And it really needs to be diversified.
You can't kind of put all your bets on one channel.
And that in-store execution piece is so crucial.
Like liquid death is the same challenge that we have
where they drive a lot more impressions than we do,
but if they're driving impressions to an empty shelf
because the distributor is not executing,
then those are impressions are almost falling on deaf ears.
So like, if you're gonna ramp up a marketing campaign,
say with a Super Bowl commercial or an out of home campaign,
you have to have enough product in stores,
you have to have your distributors incentivized to execute
because otherwise you're wasting it.
And same deal, I see a lot of young brands
press go on the marketing machine
when they're not widely available.
- Absolutely. - Yeah.
- Absolutely.
I mean, I feel bad for the audience
'cause I do constantly go back to this feastable stuff,
but it was like, it was my life for a long time.
But going, like honestly going back to like festivals, right?
Like at festivals, like we had a broken bar situation
on shelves like, not because of the product itself,
but like, because kids would like go and grab it
and they'd be like super excited about it, right?
But then when we were having also problems with
we're even just stores putting it out on the shelves.
So going back to like, to incentivizing your distributors.
- Yeah.
- To be incentivized to like, put it on the shelf,
like be out there, like constantly refreshing it,
like facing it, merchandising it, all of those things, right?
But one thing in the beginning of launching in retail
that we were doing is like, we were such a marketing engine
to do the marketing pieces and to go to the store,
but didn't understand the distribution piece of it.
- Yeah.
- You know, of like of the incentivization or it,
like we could say we're in Walmart,
but that doesn't mean you're on shelves in Walmart.
- Right.
- You in the back in Walmart.
- That's right.
- You know, and I've, and I've, and it's not even just them.
Like I've seen this even with other brands,
like young brands like, tight, you're a target now
and you're at Walmart, but that doesn't mean it.
At the 500 locations, you're on the shelves yet
because you haven't done the incentivization.
You haven't done the like, collaboration
with that distributor.
- Yeah, that's 100% right.
And like, as I think about how our marketing approach
has shifted over the last almost decade now,
in the early days, it was,
we have to make super coffee available.
And it was inch wide, mild deep.
Like we started on one store on one corner,
we went to the next closest store in that neighborhood
and then the next closest store
and we saturated a neighborhood and then a city
and then a region basically from DC to Philly
to New York to Boston.
And we got everywhere there,
ensuring that our products were on shelf.
We hired a big sales team.
We were doing the merchandising with our distributors
and our products were available and sales were great.
And if a store took a 20 case display,
which is a ton of coffee,
we would back it up with demos on the weekends
to move through it and ensure that it was selling.
And that's what we did for several years.
And then once we were able to raise money
based on that data, we spent money on Facebook ads.
We did some targeted out of home campaigns
on I-95 corridor to support Wawa,
the convenience store we just gotten into at the time.
We've done some celebrity endorsements
and not much influencer stuff.
And I think after this whole VC flooding of CPG
has cooled off, that really peaked in 2021.
And it was okay, like growth at all costs was okay
because we were losing money,
but we were growing triple digits every year
and investors kept writing checks.
And the valuation kept going up.
So I was like, all right, let's just keep growing.
And now in 2022, they said, guys,
we got to get to profitability.
So we unwound all of that.
All of this pouring gas on the fire with Facebook ads
to drive top line at the expensive bottom line,
was no longer.
And one thing, as you think of brand management
and growing top line, bottled coffee as a category
only has a 22% household penetration,
meaning eight out of 10 households don't buy coffee.
Generally, Starbucks, Dunkin, super coffee.
- Interesting.
- So like if I'm throwing a billboard up on the side
of the highway, that is not very targeted market.
So now in 2022, we're a lot more targeted
and we've got nine years worth of data
to see what other products are in our customers' carts.
It's Travani yogurt, it's Quest bars, it's RX bar,
like we talked about.
So I can serve ads to RX bar buyers and say,
we think you're qualified to buy super coffee
because you buy our X bar.
So that's, I mean, we don't say that,
but that's why they're getting the ad.
- Yeah, yeah, no.
God, oh, I wanna like dive into this one
'cause I love the subject of like,
this is on the like the D2C side,
but not on the retail side,
but there's a program called Disco.
I don't know if you've heard of it,
but so Disco is really cool
and the same in the aspect for D2C, right?
Kind of does that same offering of like,
okay, I don't know if you're a hydration company, right?
- Yeah.
- New moms really love hydration, right?
So it's like they take those data points
and then offer your products in the post checkout, right?
And so I love that concept though.
I know that tool specifically is for D2C,
but I love this concept of like in the retail markets,
of like finding out what your customers are,
your customers are gonna buy,
what their behaviors are,
and then slinging them your products
based off of like them fitting your customer persona.
- Totally.
- Totally.
- This is a funny one because it hasn't even happened yet.
March 11th, we're on,
March 6th right now when we record this.
So we got this data from 7-Eleven
that said super coffee way over indexes with protein bars,
specifically quest bars.
And we love that.
So we said, we reached out to the Quest team
and we said, hey, we should do a collaboration.
Buy a super coffee and a quest bar,
save $1 off at 7-Eleven.
And Quest is a big,
they're owned by a big publicly traded company now,
and it's tough to kind of get stuff done.
But I kept chipping away.
I was like, at the very least,
let's start with the social media giveaway,
then do an email giveaway.
And I kept getting the stiff arm.
And I was like, guys, look, we have a big list here.
We can do all of this.
And this was six months ago.
And on March 11th, I just saw on Amazon,
Quest bar is launching a protein coffee
with zero sugar and 10 grams of protein.
- Stop.
- Yes.
Good for them, right?
It's capitalism, it's all of this.
But it's a great insight that people who buy quest bars
also buy a lot of super coffee.
- Yeah.
- Quest bar shit, I'd launch a coffee.
- Yeah.
- I mean, we gotta meet our macros with our protein, you know?
- I guess so, yeah.
- Gotta get the bar and the coffee at the same time.
Wow, dang, how bummed were you though
when you found that out?
- No, I mean, it makes sense, right?
Good for them.
I think it's tough to do.
And you gotta stay focused on your core,
like for us to launch a bar or a cereal would be bonkers.
- Dude.
- It's also really hard.
- It's a different game.
- It's a different game.
You know, that's like doing chocolate
and an energy drink, you know?
- Yeah, yeah, I talked to a guy this morning
who's got successful coffee cafes,
like a small chain in Houston.
And he's like, "Yo, I'm getting into RTD.
Like what should I, what do you wanna tell me?"
Like, "Don't do that, dude."
Like it is so hard.
- It is, like.
- Yeah, it's so expensive.
- Yeah.
- And like, there's no way to have like a subscale RTD business
because you're selling a bottle to distributors for $1.50.
It costs you a dollar to make it, you know,
you're making 50 cents.
Like, you literally have to sell 100 million bottles
to pay your bills.
- Yeah.
- And to get to that point,
you lose so much money to get there.
- Yeah, I know.
And for the audience, like if you don't know what RTD is,
it's ready to drink.
So like your beverage category,
if you're at like at your grocery store.
- Yeah, sorry, we're getting like technical.
- We're real deep over here in the CPG world,
but, oh, and CPG, consumer package goods.
(laughs)
- There it is.
- We said that one.
Okay, cool.
So I feel like I really actually want to come back to,
like just your customer journey.
You know, at the end of the day,
I'm like a CX girl, customer experience
is like my fucking jam.
Like that is, ooh, I am, right?
So I actually am just interested to know,
'cause I've dealt with this a lot, like at Feastables,
but when you made that switch, right, to be predominantly
retail and Amazon, like did you,
were on your other channels, like getting like
customer service tickets, like were people reaching out
to like find out about product info
or like being like a affiliate of the brand
or any of that stuff?
Like did you see like volumes going down?
- When we made the switch from Shopify to Amazon?
- Yeah, exactly.
- Yes, but for a lot of reasons, right?
We stopped spending so much money on ads,
like there was less marketing happening.
So ultimately less traffic to the page, less conversion,
but like a huge CX channel for us is social media, right?
DMs, comments, all that.
We still, we have like some family at drinksupercoffee.com.
That's our CX email.
So people will head us up like,
where can I buy you guys, stuff like that?
And then Amazon tickets, I don't know,
you always hear from the loud minority who's like,
hey, I ordered 12 bottles and you only sent me 11.
- Yeah.
- Sorry.
- I'm sorry we messed up, man.
Like here's a free package.
- Totally, totally.
But yeah, it was everywhere at once, all at once.
And we've tried, we talked to you about this,
but we've tried a bunch of different tools.
We were at Zendes, we were with gorgeous,
we were with gladly, like we had multiple.
- Yeah, yeah.
I think it's really interesting,
like just from a customer service perspective, right?
It's like you beef up the customer service department.
So much for like when you're in like direct consumer
and then when you open these other channels,
like the volume actually kind of just definitely goes down
and then you don't need, you might not need like
all the people on the team, you know?
Which is kind of a hot take.
But I think it's really interesting also how
your tickets change, your tickets change in the sense of
like you're not obviously dealing with order support anymore.
You're dealing with like, I love your brand,
like this is so sick or a complaint, you know?
- Totally.
Or like, hey, lately there's been this trend on TikTok
where people are like, hey, we're going to my friends
Bachelorette this weekend and we want super coffee there.
- Dude, I know.
- And then we're blowing up about it.
- Dude, it's not just you, it's literally every brand
that I advise or just homies of, like whatever.
It's literally every single one of these brands
are having this issue right now.
- Yeah, I mean, it's a good problem to have
and kudos to these girls.
It's funny, so like we saw this literally like over two days
we had 200 people reach out to us
and we didn't post anything like this is like a TikTok trend.
And so I was like, let's make a video and tell them like,
hey, whoever sends us the best videos
will sponsor your Bachelorette.
So I created this video, it was like kind of sick,
edited, posted and that shit got like 40 views and three likes.
I was like, what the hell, what kind of trend is this?
- This is trending.
- Yeah.
- Oh man, influencer marketing 101.
- I have a good job.
- Not everything goes viral.
- That's right.
- Man, do you guys want to sponsor my Bachelorette?
- Is it this year?
- Yeah.
- Let's go.
- Yes.
- Done, that's an easy one.
- Yeah, so anybody tune in on what I'm getting married this year
but two, about to have a sick Bachelorette party.
- What are you gonna do?
- Gurnville in Russian River,
like it's right outside of San Francisco.
- Sick.
- I'm from the Bay Area and honestly, well, my fiancee
and I kind of switched, which is funny
because he's like super introverted
and like doesn't know what he wanted to do.
So like my, we have mutual friends that are going
on his and mine too.
And anyway, we switched and he was,
and I was like, oh, maybe I'll go to New Orleans
or I'll go like here, like some sick thing, right?
And he kept being like, oh, well, maybe I want to do that.
And we were trying to push him to go to the woods.
So we flipped and I was like, listen, man,
I'm gonna go to the woods
and I'm gonna go chill on a river somewhere.
You go to New Orleans.
So he might need the coffee more than me.
- Oh, we'll send it.
- More, I'm like, I'm gonna be a chiller out kind of gal.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, yeah, we'll do both.
That's awesome, congrats.
- Thanks.
Didn't you say you just got engaged too?
- Yeah.
Yeah, we're gonna do the wedding next year, 2025.
- Yeah, I'm a psychopath and I'm gonna do it this year.
- Yeah, let's go.
- Like I got engaged in December.
- Okay, so fucking psycho-pop.
- Wait, no time.
- I know, you know?
Okay, I want to ask you just some like random questions.
- Yeah.
- Actually, these are a little random,
but I kind of want to go into like personal brand building.
'Cause you do like speaking engagements and stuff
and I think it's really important
that founders kind of build their own brand
outside of their brand.
Like, but that's my thought.
Like what's your thought as like being a f-one
of a founder group, right?
Like what's your thoughts on building your personal brand
outside of the brand itself?
- I think that there's like,
this is a tricky thing to explain,
but basically like there's no real recipe
for building your personal brand.
Like what I've found is go deep on something
at becoming an expert in like a very narrow,
single-minded thing.
And for me, it's super coffee.
You know, it's not CX, it's not brand off.
It's like super coffee.
I know super coffee better than everybody
and I'll fight my brothers on that one.
So go super deep on something
and then honestly and authentically talk about it, right?
And I think where people go wrong is they see
Jess and her podcast or they see Devin LeVake,
Bearcrawling Marathons or they see Mr. Beast
doing his thing on YouTube and they're like,
oh, that's the playbook.
Let me go try and do that.
If you're not Jimmy, if you're not Jimmy,
you're not gonna be Mr. Beast, you know?
And my buddy, Matt Choy has become this like huge running
influencer in Austin and all this dude posts
his running videos.
What's his workout?
What's he eating?
And it's just running, running, running.
And he doesn't sway, you know, he's not lifting weights.
He's not like swimming.
It's just fricking running.
So I think stay in your lane, become an expert on something
and then just document it.
- Yeah.
Yeah, no, I agree with you.
Like going to back to that Mr. Beast example though,
it's really interesting like people do content
and we all like content is king and queen man.
Like, you know, it's not just about posting.
It's like shorts, it's all these things,
like doing really fun stuff.
But if you're gonna do it, do it 110.
- Yeah.
- But maybe that's because like the brand piece of it, right?
Like I see some pretty shoddy content out there
and I'm just like, dang.
- Yeah.
- I don't know if that's good.
And I'm not saying like go and do the studio
and like do all these things.
I'm just saying like, you're gonna put your personal brand
attaching to something, do it at 110.
- Totally.
- Don't have facet.
- Yeah.
And it's like a thousand and 10, you know,
like you can't even comprehend it.
I just saw a quote from Mr. Beast the other day
that was like, nobody has put in more time
over the same time period than me.
He's like, when I was sitting in math class,
I was thinking about YouTube.
When I was on a date with my girlfriend,
I was thinking about YouTube.
Like when I was with my family,
I was thinking about YouTube.
And it's like that level of obsession.
Sure, we all see these guys and their money
and their fame and who they're hanging out with.
But we don't see like, what did it take him?
- It'll work.
- 500 videos to get up to a million views or something crazy.
And you just gotta pound it and do it
and believe in it and obsess over it.
And for me, like I've been doing super coffee for nine years.
Like I'm no expert at any one thing,
but nobody knows more about my business than me.
So I can sit here and confidently talk about it.
- Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
What's your thoughts on like the founder story for a brand?
Like I know we were talking about like
the personal brand story, but like what's like
some founders are kind of like become like
that faceless account, you know?
Like don't put themselves in front of it.
Like do you think that there's greater value
in like putting your face out there as like,
I'm the founder of this?
Or do you think that like the faceless ways are okay too?
- I think it depends on brand product category, right?
But like in the early days, that story is important.
You know, like, hey, there wasn't a product out there
that met my needs.
I had this problem.
So I solved it with this product.
You know, like that's kind of like the classic playbook
for certainly for natural foods industry of like
solving something you wanted a healthier version
of your favorite snack, whatever.
But at a certain point, the brand needs to transcend
the founders, you know?
- Absolutely.
- And absolutely.
- Absolutely.
- Yeah.
- It doesn't mean we need to be dissociated with the brand,
but like I guarantee you 90% of the people
who buy super coffee don't know who I am, right?
And don't know who my brothers are.
And then on the flip side, there's a risk with like a prime,
for example, without Logan Paul,
it's just a crappy sports drink.
- Yeah.
- You know, and I think that's a risk
when you think of like strategic acquirers like Coca-Cola
or Pepsi or whatever, I think they see that as a risk.
Like sure that brand's on fire.
It's doing billions of dollars in revenue,
super profitable.
But without Logan or if Logan were to get in trouble,
that brand doesn't let, like the prime brand is Logan.
- Yeah.
- You know, and that's risky to be attached
so much to one property or one person.
- No, absolutely.
I absolutely agree with you.
I absolutely agree with you.
I mean, obviously these are completely different
fucking categories, right?
Like celebrity and like a regular brand, right?
But I think like that founder's stories like is really good,
like to get it out there, like the story that you were saying,
like going out there and sampling and getting on more shelves.
Like you guys were out there hustling, right?
Like that's a part of your story,
but then at some point the brand has to supersede you.
And then going back to the celebrity example
'cause this is like where I've lived
in that influencer space, like I think that like,
I think it's all really important that even on the influence
on the creator brand side, that like that,
that product has to supersede that creator and influencer.
Because if you have that attachment of like,
this person like, you know, gets a DUI
or does something really crazy
and says something racist online,
like the brand's going down the tube, you know?
- Totally.
- So I think like the founder's story is important
for those initial stages from like an acquisition point of view,
but we talk about acquisition retention
like from the retention point of view
and like the lifetime value of like in the longevity,
you gotta like detach it at some point.
- Yeah.
So the one brand that I think does it really well at scale,
have you tried Poppy, the pre-baldic sort of?
- Yeah.
- Do you know who Alison is?
- No.
- Okay, so that's a brand that's great product,
great packaging, great branding.
And the founder, Poppy and Supercoffee kind of came up
at the same time, right?
We both on Shark Tank around the same time,
we're both in Bevnet at the same time.
And I know them really well.
So like, I'm kind of close to them.
But if you go to their Instagram, it's Alison,
the founder, it's husband, wife duo,
Alison telling stories about Shark Tank
and why she created the product.
And this is a $200 million revenue company.
And she's still out there preaching it.
But this is a product that you know and drink
and you don't know her.
So it's like a good balance.
- Yeah, that's a really good example of it.
All right, my dude, we are at the end of the road.
- This is freaking great.
- I know, I feel like we could talk for hours
and like, I honestly, even if the cameras go off,
we're gonna do this.
But where can people find you, Jimmy?
- Yes, LinkedIn is occasionally posting on there,
on Instagram, my brothers and I are still doing
a lot of videos on drink, super coffees page,
telling stories, super coffees available
in grocery stores nationwide, based in Austin, Texas.
So if any of y'all are ever coming down here, hit us up.
- Austin, Texas, I'm always here now.
- Yeah.
- All right, well, thank you for joining us
for another episode of the Juice
and I'll see you guys next Thursday.
- Toodles.
- Hey, wow, you made it to the end of the episode.
That means that you like me and I like you,
which also means you should subscribe to this show.
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