The art of selling a feeling

Taika’s macadamia latté is easily the best can of coffee I’ve ever tasted, beating any variety of my beloved Boss in Japan, the sugary Starbucks DoubleShot, or the various canned cold brews recently introduced by name-your-favorite-third-wave-coffee-company. It’s made with great coffee beans — from 49th Parallel in Vancouver — and has a subtle swee... See more

Freese and his co-founder, former early Facebook mobile product manager Michael Sharon, are calling this “stealth health” — the idea that you should be able to buy a healthier version of a beverage or food that tastes just as good, if not better, than the unhealthy default.

But Recess has faced an even bigger retail growth challenge since the beginning: While CBD has attracted a lot of attention and investment, it’s still a legal gray area, and national chains like Whole Foods and Target won’t stock it. Witte says he still spends about half his time working on regulation.

Witte says direct-to-consumer sales, as measured by weekly revenue run rate, are up 4X since before COVID-19, and average order value is up 30%. It recently launched subscriptions, which now represent more than 30% of orders. And the company’s “direct-to-business” wholesale e-commerce channel is up 3X since April, which has helped Recess get into s... See more

Building a beverage brand used to be a function of buying advertising, courting the right distributors and merchants, designing attention-grabbing packaging, and paying the right bribes to get good placement at retail.

Responding to my questions around efficacy, Sharon says he doesn’t feel “like we need to lean on the science” for the product to be successful. If people discover it and just think it’s delicious coffee, that’s good enough. Ready-to-drink coffee is already a growing market that needs quality competition.

It’s different now, when brands can build their own communities on Instagram and Twitter, sell cases and subscriptions directly to consumers, and re-engage through text, e-mail, and Facebook ads.